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Friday, May 29, 2015

MMS Photo-inator Xsi -- 8 May 2015 Session

Even though I am posting this near the end of May, I am describing my efforts from 8 May 2015.

While at the Milwaukee Makerspace for my weekly Maker-time, I continued working on my idea to use a Raspberry Pi 2 Model B to make a device that will take pictures by controlling an SLR camera. 

New Camera
I found a Canon PowerShot A540 camera sitting in a drawer in the 3D printer area at the 'space.  I hooked that up to the PI to see if I would fare any better with gphoto2.

Executed gphoto2 -auto-detect.  gphoto2 will only detect the camera if the power is on.  It says that capture is not supported by the driver.  This could be a problem if I want to save power by turning the camera off when the photo-inator is not in use.  The power button is a momentary switch.  So, it has to be pushed to turn the camera on or off.  This is not the ideal situation.

The batteries are low.  Need to find a 3.15v DC power source with a male plug if I want this camera to stay on indefinitely.

I did not have much luck playing with this camera compared to the Canon A470.  Ed from the Makerspace told me about software called CHDK.  CHDK is software that runs on a Canon camera.  It gives you a new user interface and more options.  This might be an option.

The software for the Canon A540 can be found here:  http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/A540

Not much progress this week.

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