names_r_hard

I don't believe they did. Where did they say that?

Over the years, a few devs have temp soft bricked cams, requiring various non-standard methods to restore them to working order. I think all attempts succeeded so far! I don't think any permanent physical damage has been triggered by devs. It is definitely a real risk, but we try to work with the OS when possible, and the OS was written to try to make these things hard.

I don't think I'd want to learn the ropes on a cam too expensive to psychologically say goodbye to. Maybe save that for the second port.

I don't know of a way to do that. I don't think the cam will ever display an image on LV while a capture is in progress. The readout process from the sensor is fundamentally decoupled from the capture. You could probably interleave long exposures with short ones at greatly boosted ISO, and display only the short ones on LV.

I was assuming it would be possible to quite accurately model the drift over time, and adjust the model based on the last image. The model continuously guides the mount, and the lag in updates hopefully wouldn't matter - so you can use saved images, not LV. In fact, we can trigger actions to occur on the in memory image just before writing out.

Nearly all Canons have a small access port as part of the battery door, which you can put a power supply cable / through, by design. Don't buy too cheap a dummy battery, the really cheap ones may have very bad voltage regulation. You can get ones designed to work from a USB power bank, or mains.

Ah I'd love an astro conversion.

I've had a fun idea knocking around for a while for astro. These cams have a fairly accessible serial port, hidden under the thumb grip rubber. I think the 6D may have one in the battery grip pins, too. We can sample LV data at any time, and do some tricks to boost exposure for "night vision". Soooo, you could turn the cam itself into a star tracker, which controlled a mount over serial. While doing the photo sequence. I bet you could do some very cool tricks with that. Bit involved for a first time project though :D

The 6D is a fairly well understood and supported cam, and your compiler background should really help you - so really the question is what would you like to add? I can then give a decent guess about how hard various things might be. I believe the 6D has integrated Wifi. We understand the network stack (surprisingly standard!) and a few demo things have been written, but nothing very useful so far. Maybe an auto image upload service? Would be cool to support something like OAuth, integrate with imgur etc?

It's slow work, but hopefully you don't mind that too much, compilers have a similar reputation.

You're a better photographer than I am. I'm glad if ML helped you.

Please recruit your programmer friends to the cause :) The R7 is a target cam, but nobody has started work on it yet. There is some early work on the R5 and R6. I don't remember for the R7, but from the age and tier, this may be one of the new gen quad core AArch64.

I expect these modern cams to be powerful enough to run YOLO on cam, perhaps with sub 1s latency. Could be some fun things to do there.

Yes, it gets a bit blurry, especially given how fast solid-state storage is these days.

I think IoT has seen a resurgence in firmware devs... but regrettably not so much in quality. Too cheap to be worth it, I suppose. I can imagine a microwave could be quite a concerning product to design - there's some fairly obvious risks there!

Certainly, whatever you class ML as, we could damage the hardware. The shutter in particular is quite vulnerable, and Canon has made an unusual design choice that it flashes an important rom with settings at every power off. Leaving these settings in an inconsistent state can prevent the cam from booting. We do try to think hard about contingencies, and program defensively. At least for anything we release. I've done some very stupid tests on my own cams, and only needed to recover with UART access once ;)

I haven't use ICE, but I have used SoftICE. Oh, and we had a breakthrough on locating JTAG pinouts very recently, so we might end up being able to do similar.

Yeah, the external timer behaviour is fairly strong evidence. Curious though. These cams all seem to have a milli- and micro-second hw clock, and can both schedule and sleep against either. But it's also true that every cam has some weird quirks. And I don't know the 5d2 internals well.

From what I've seen, the image capture process is state machine based and tries to avoid sleeps and delays. Which makes sense for RTOS and professional photography.

If you care enough to debug it, pop into the discord and I can make you some tests to run.

Okay, good, just making sure :) Fun to hear that at least some photo gear places are aware of ML!

I have done a stint in QA, as well as highly aggressive security testing against a big C codebase, so I too care a lot about quality. And you can do it in C, you just have to put in the effort.

I'd like to get Valgrind or ASAN working with our code, but that's quite a big task on an RTOS. It would be more practical in Qemu, but still a lot of effort. The OS has multiple allocators, and we don't include stdlib.

Re firmware / software, doesn't all software run on a device? So I suppose it depends what you mean by a device. Is a Windows exe on a desktop PC firmware? Is an app from your phones store firmware? We support cams that are much more powerful than low end Android devices. Here the cam OS, which is on flash ROM, brings the hardware up, then loads our code from removable storage, which can even be a spinning rust drive. It feels like they're firmware, and we're software, to me. It's not a clearly defined term.

The main reason I make the distinction is because we get a lot of users who think ML is like a phone rom flash, because that's what firmware is to most people. Thus they assume it's a risky process, and that the Canon menus etc will be gone. But we don't work that way.

Canon have never had any contact with ML project for any reason, to the best of my knowledge. The decision to stay away from 1D series was made by ML team, I would say out of an abundance of caution to try not to annoy them.

Strange, it certainly can do sub 5s on some bodies. But I don't have a 5d2 to test with.

Could this be a conflict with long exposures? Conceivably AF, too. The intervalometer will attempt to trigger capture every 5s wall time. If the combined time to AF seek, expose, and finish saving to card (etc) is >5s, you will skip a shot.

When the time comes, compare the price of a used 5d3 vs a shutter replacement on the 5d2, maybe you'll get a "free" upgrade :) Thanks for the kind words!

Thanks, and for what it's worth, I didn't downvote you (account is too new to even do so :D ), and I agree with your main point - it's not that hard to avoid all compiler warnings if you do it from the start, and make sure it's highly visible.

You only add one at a time, so you only need to fix one at a time, and you understand what you're trying to do.

It is, however, a real bitch to fix all compiler warnings in decade old code that targets a set of undocumented hardware platforms with which you are unfamiliar. And you just updated the toolchain from gcc 5 to 12.

I've taught several different languages to both 1st year uni students, and new joiners to a technical company, where they had no programming background.

Honestly, C seems to be one of the easier languages to teach the basics of. It's certainly easier than Java or C++, which have many more concepts.

C has some concepts that confuse the hell out of beginners, and it will let you shoot yourself in the foot very thoroughly with them (much more than say, Java). But you don't tend to encounter them till later on.

I have never said getting good at C is easy. Just that it's easy to pick up.