CHKD

[orionid]

Has anyone done anything with CHKD?

After my beater decided to fly into the sunset, Kestrana has offered to replace it as a birthday present to me this year. My first thought was to get another exilim, since I’ve already built hardware based around it (like my kite rig or the big-ass rocket). The more I read about CHKD, though, the more I’m leaning that way. Some of the canon P&S’s will hook right up to the kite rig (hell, in a stiff wind, it’ll hold the d90, but I don’t know if I’m that brave… again… first time the wind was too light and I got some nice pics of my shoes). I can build a new payload section for the rocket that fits a new camera easy enough, now that all the pre-flight research and experimentation has been done. And I’ve been planning a more powerful booster section, as well.

I’m not even sure what my questions actually are. I guess maybe I just need validation before getting *shudder* a *gulp* canon.

[nobigdeal]

I haven’t messed with it mostly because I am worried that I will brick my cameras and I can’t afford that right now.

[CauseISaidSo]

I haven’t actually played with it, but I don’t think you have to worry about bricking your camera, NoBigDeal. The way I understand it, it doesn’t REPLACE your firmware, it just runs additional software on top of it from an SD memory card. Remove the card and your camera’s back to original specs.

orionid, while I haven’t used CHDK, I am a Canon user, both P&S & DSLR. My first digital was the Canon Powershot G2 and several pictures from it are in my top entries.

The only thing I’d say about it is to check with the CHDK website for specific models and even firmware before buying one, if your specific goal is to run CHDK on it. They suggest downloading the software to an SD card and taking that into the store to check the camera’s firmware version before buying to make sure you’re getting a compatible level of firmware.

[CauseISaidSo]

OK, talk about coincidental timing. The Near Space column writer for Nuts & Volts that we were talking about here has just started a series of articles on using CHDK to do weather balloon photography.

The article this month is mostly just about downloading and installing CHDK. The next article should have info about his experiences with it and photos from it. For the limited crowd that may be interested in this, let me know and I may be able to get you a PDF of the article(s).

[chupathingie]

/me raises hand… would love to see that article.

Orionid, another canon owner here… I can’t recommend their P&Ss more. I’ve been using a powershot SD1100IS now for about 2 years. Great picture quality (they went with larger filesize/lower compression on the “fine” setting.. 5-6 meg per image in my case at 8MP). I’ve beaten the snot outta this thing and it still works flawlessly. I’m planning on doing a test drive of CHDK myself, if I can ever get some time off from work.

[CauseISaidSo]

It looks like the article may be publically accessible here: http://nutsvolts.texterity.com/nutsvolts/201009/?pg=68&pm=2&u1=friend

If that link doesn’t work or requires a log-in, PM me your email and I’ll send you the PDF version. I really like this magazine and don’t want to hurt its sales, so I don’t want to post it on a public site for everyone to grab, but I am willing to share it with the small group of friends here.

Like I said, this article just deals with installing CHDK and the Near Space column only runs every other month, so we’ll have a bit of a wait to get the next one. If I don’t remember, feel free to remind me for the next installment.

[orionid]

Awesome!
Article loads fine. And maybe it’s time to give N&V a test drive. Looks like they’ve come along way from the black and white newspaper-like pages they had in the late 80’s.

[lokisbong]

I am gonna have to play with this too. I already have a a560 and I see it is on the list of cameras this works on. It might be interesting even though I don’t plan on flying my camera to the edge of space. oh and no problems with the article here either.

[chupathingie]

Meh, illegible for me in FF under ubuntu. Oddly enough the text was legible under IE7 at work, but obscured with tools and widgets on the page. No matter, I see a trip to my local bookstore this weekend to help them make ends meet. I need some reading material ennyhoo.

[Elsinore]

This is kinda late in the game given your birthday is in a couple days, but Zeke messed around with CHKD for my A620, and it’s a lot of fun! He has it on one of the spare memory cards, so you just pop it in, turn on the camera, and you’re in CHKD mode. Turn off the camera, replace the card with a regular one, and you’re back in regular mode. No bricking. Some folks think Canon is giving unofficial tacit approval to this. I will say the RAW option isn’t that great, which might be CHKD or it might be the camera itself, which of course wasn’t really intended for RAW. But there are lots of fun toys that CHKD opens up for you. I’d think it’d be totally worth it for what you’re doing, even if you have to go Canon 😉

[chupathingie]

Sometimes I think Canon is actually sane about things compared to other large corporations. They got an instant boost of respect from me by releasing the 20Da, which a lot of astrophotographers jumped on. So many of them were modding their DSLRs to remove the IR block filters for HA imaging that Canon decided to give them what they wanted.

Maybe they realize that allowing folks to tinker with their gear might boost sales.

[Elsinore]

I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if that were the case, actually.

[olavf]

If you read through the CDHK FAQs, somewhere in there is a note from someone quoting a Canon CSR as saying it wouldn’t void the warranty. So, they’re aware of it, and haven’t taken any steps to have that removed…

I’m guessing they’re being passive about it. They don’t want to ‘actively’ support it (though I wish they did – like Linksys does with some of their routers) but they’re not saying ‘don’t do it’ either. I understand that there are a very few cases where a combination of settings can damage the camera – IIRC there was something about certain circumstances where you could try to drive the zoom past the stops and potentially damage the gearing – but I think it’s a safe bet that they service a lot more returns for general stupidity (the “it quit working all of a sudden but I’m not going to tell you I dropped it” ones) than they’d ever see from those instances, or just from someone using CDHK in general.

And besides, they allow users to do firmware upgrades. That’s far, far more risky than someone running a layer of software on top.

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