I thought some might be interested in a preview video/article I did about the Camera Axe 5 Shield for Arduino. Camera Axe is an open source project that's been going on for many years now and focuses on letting you plug multiple sensors into it that can then trigger multiple cameras/flashes. Some of the common uses are photographing bullets, water droplets, and wildlife. Previous iterations of the Camera Axe where stand-alone (though they did use the Arduino bootloader) so this is the first time I'm doing a shield kit option.
with some USB Host shields existing, do you eventually see USB cables replacing proprietry cables for communications between the microcontroller and camera/flash?.
tsort, I will make the eagle and gerber pcb files available once I have the final version ready and it is easy to get the dimensions from those.
novice, I doubt USB cables will replace propriety camera trigger cables any time soon. I just don't see the big time DSLR camera makers like Canon or Nikon changing to a unified USB shutter cable. It is worth noting that Canon does have USB plug, but communicating with that is slower and they don't release the specs about how to do that communication. They have an SDK, but it only works on Microsoft Windows so it's not very useful for this sort of thing. Maybe the Camera Axe will someday have a USB cable, but it's not on the short list today. Of course if someone wants to help out with that let me know.
I have some EOS and Powershot-specific protocol details here, along with Arduino library -> http://www.circuitsathome.com/arduino_usb_host_shield_projects . It is true that dedicated shutter release port on the camera gives better precision, especially when combined with flash synchro output; however, USB gives you access to shooting parameters which opens very interesting possibilities.
I'm always looking for new ideas and help with this project. If anyone wants to help post to the Camera Axe forums and let us know what you want to help with. http://dreamingrobots.com/forums/viewforum.php?f=8
I didn't look at the arducam-osd project that much, but from what I gather they just use standard PTP, which won't do much on Nikon or Canon cameras which have some proprietary PTP extensions, and to do the really interesting things you need to access their completely proprietary APIs instead of the subset of functionality they expose with PTP. As you can tell I've thought some about this in the past, but to do this properly would me a lot of USB sniffing and decoding for each camera. I agree there are a lot of interesting possibilities with this, but to me that's a different project than what we're doing with the Camera Axe.
