CHDK
Fresh from the why-didn’t-anyone-tell-me-about-this-sooner dept.: CHDK, the Canon Hackers’ Development Kit. CHDK lets you access capabilities of your camera that Canon never intended that you should, all without changing your firmware or doing anything other than writing a couple files to your SD card. You can change the shutter settings, take RAW photos, run scripts, even read text files and play games.
I strongly approve of this sort of thing, as evidenced by my prior enthusiasm for BitPim. However, unlike BitPim, which only lets you transfer files to and from your phone (although that is very nice), CHDK actually lets you do things that your camera is capable of, but that Canon didn’t design into the firmware. Personally, I feel that this verges on malpractice–if there’s something that the hardware can do and that most people won’t want to use, go ahead and hide it in an “Advanced” menu, or even behind a “Enter the following number in hexadecimal” challenge if you want to get fancy, but don’t make people who are smart enough to know what it is have to resort to hacks like this to use the hardware to its fullest. This is part of my problem with BREW–if my telephone can run arbitrary code, then I should be able to run arbitrary code on it, without needing to know any secret licensing handshake. Free hardware is an inherently good thing.
Politics aside, I suppose not knowing about CHDK earlier is my own fault for not keeping up with Lifehacker and Hack-a-Day and Photojojo and Wired and such. I suppose I’ll have to plead bar-exam craziness and get off the hook that way.
2 comments June 25th, 2008
