We had a interesting dicussion at last nights open hack, ranging from what is the essence of a hackerspace to how to make a robotic bar tender. Oh and there was some discussion of gaming the stock market… I mostly goofed around the CHDK firmware I mentioned on the mailing list.
CHDK is a simple install. You look up your Canon cameras model and firmware, then download the appropriate package and load it onto the SD card. The software runs off the card so no messing with your cameras guts. If you erase the card or put a new one in, the camera is back to normal.
The gif above is made using a script I found and loaded onto a Canon Point Shoot to do basic motion detection. Everytime Mark made a significant movement the camera would snap another image. It seemed to make a nice animation.
Most of the night I spent working on a focus stack. The script was pretty simple: take a picture, have the camera precisely adjust the focus by a few centimeters, repeat. The scripting is done in uBasic. The series of images can be loaded into Photoshop and blended to create an image with a really large depth of field. Unfortunately, with most of my results from last night, Photoshop got a bit cubist on me. But I got some interesting images of Joe.
Oh and yes, as Justin mentioned, you can play games on your camera.
