Camera Pi – DSLR Camera with Embedded Computer

Very cool! What saddens me is that there is already an embedded computer on the camera! There is just not a good way to program it.<p>While there are some great efforts, like Magic Lantern, to reverse engineer and improve the firmware, I wish the producers just made the source part of their product. (I don't believe their trade secrets are that valuable to be honest. Not more valuable than letting people builds apps for your camera, at least)

Here is my rant, as an experimental (panorama, gigapixel) photographer: Canon, Nikon, and the rest of them will go to their graves keeping their firmware closed and un-scriptable. It is a tragedy. Mobile phones and the Gopro are eating their lunch. The fact that there is even a (niche) market for things like the Eye-fi (wifi sd card) goes to show how utterly clueless and behind the times these dinosaur camera companies really are.

This is Stanford's take on what can be done if you could fully program the computer in your camera and it had the sensors of a smartphone: <a href="http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/camera-2.0/" rel="nofollow">http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/camera-2.0/</a>

As a hobbyist photographer this definitely sounds interesting in terms of allowing more control over the camera (especially automated uses, build your own timelapse, get past the 30s long exposure instead of having to buy a $150 canon timer remote, et cetera). But doing anything with image manipulation and transfer (maybe there's a reason Eye-fi hasn't moved into the DSLR space -- no CF version, only Class 6 speeds) seems like a daunting task for the pi..<p>For those more familiar with the Raspberry Pi, does it actually have enough performance to move big RAW files around? A 5D3 will output ~30MB RAWs and in a shoot you may end up with 500+ of them. Having a Pi transfer/move/adjust them sounds like a slog.

nikon are releasing an android camera<p><a href="http://www.extremetech.com/electronics/134190-nikons-android-powered-camera-isnt-as-cool-as-you-think" rel="nofollow">http://www.extremetech.com/electronics/134190-nikons-android...</a>

FYI you need a powered USB hub to attach that wifi dongle.<p>I also got one of those small Realtek RTL8188SU wifi dongles and found that it worked very poorly. I don't know if it was the particular vendor I got mine from or the drivers or that particular chipset, but the interface would just stop working if you tried to do anything data intensive or prolonged on it. SSH and VNC were unusable.