Thursday, May 8, 2008

Hack your canon powershot camera

Incidentally, this is my first post on gadget other than iphone. I will try to do more justice to my blogname "gadgetsandyou"(not "iphoneandyou") by trying to write more about other gadgets too. Technically, the following is not really hacking, but just upgrading the fimware in a twisted way.

Do you know that you can power up you canon powershot camera with enhanced capabilities. All you need to do is to install an add-on firmware to the existing firmware. The best part of this exercise is that the original firmware from canon does not get erased or overwritten.

This is the article that I first came across related to this topic. It finally lead me to the home page of the CHDK project. With this you can enhance your cameras which has DigicII/DigicIII processors. This is the list of supported cameras.

Some of the cool additional features that you would get are as follows
- Enhanced Image Capture
- Additional display information
- Additional Settings
- Support for custom scripts (I am exited about it)
- Continuous display of battery charge
- RGB Histograms
- Motion-detection triggered photography
- Additional applications like calendar and games.

The above is just a tip of the iceberg. There are lot of major and minor enhancements. I am going to try this out this weekend. I will post my experience.

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