Using Canon S2IS digital camera as webcam

Here are the two links that I found on this subject. One is the Cam4you and the other is Softcam.

cam4you is a freeware. I tried cam4you and realized that there is a big catch. After googling, I confirmed that my understading about the catch is true. Here is a nice tutorial on using cam4you and the tutorial's author confirming the catch. Do not confuse this with Cam4you-remote, which the application author confirmed that it cannot be used as webcam.

The big catch is that you cannot use the camera as a webcam which can be used for video conferencing. In other words, the digital camera cannot be mimicked as a webcam which can be used with your yahoo/MSN messenger. What you can do is to upload the pictures to a location on the web, which gets refreshed. So, your viewers have to refresh their page every time they want to see the latest image (Note that some browsers like opera have the built-in capability to auto-refresh at a chosen frequency. You also can get addons firefox & IE which can do this).

It seems that this limitation is not there in softcam, which can grab any piece of your screen and provide that as a feed from the webcam. The feed can be used in chat clients like Yahoo/MSN.
It is a licensed software. Though a shareware version is available, I did not try it out. I will try it out and will update this post later

Added CHDK firmware. Could not tune motion detection

After a row with vendor of card reader from ebay, and after some hiccups, I was finally successful in loading the CHDK firmware into my canon S2IS camera. Loading the CHDK firmware is easy once you follow the instructions carefully. I tried to be smart by not reading the manual fully and guessing the remaining.

I realized lately that the memory card should be kept in locked state for the firmware to load. If the card is not put in locked state, the CHDK firmware would not load. The camera will continue to work with the default firmware(by canon). The interesting thing to note here is that the pictures can still be recorded in the memory card even if it is locked. Till now, I thought that the lock physically protects the card from writing. But now, I understand that it is just a logical protection. i.e., The software has to respect the lock on the reader. I can write a software that will not honor the lock and will write it into the memory card even if it is locked.

I experimented a little with the new firmware and enhanced capabilities. I liked the RGB histograms etc stuff. I still need to explore lot of new functionality. The most interesting thing that drove me to upgrade to CHDK firmware is the motion-triggered photography, especially the lightening photography. But I am not much successful with it. There are a bunch of scripts on motion detection and others that one can explore.

The problem with the motion triggered photography is that there are a bunch of parameters in each script, which needs to be tuned. I am not able to tune those parameters to quickly take a photograph after motion is detected. The camera takes a lot of time after the motion happened. Added those parameters, the camera settings also should be tuned well. I was able to improve somewhat by setting the manual focus mode, and continuous shooting mode. Another problem is that the picture is not taken even if there is motion. I guess we need to tune the "threshold" parameter properly.

I will write one more post if I am satisfied with my experiments on motion triggered photography.

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.