Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/02/20/alt-firmware.html
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Replace the OS? Isn’t that a felony? Oh God, I can hear the OSSWAT team now, rappelling in through the skylight of my lair!
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Okay, not your content …
Errata:
- Magic Lantern does not replace Canon’s firmware, it runs along with it. Much like a program/app running on Windows/Linux/macOS/Android/iOS. All Canon menus and functions are still available and working.
- It runs from any card you can put into your cam. Doesn’t matter if CF or SD. Exceptions: Crappy SD-to-CF adapters (= all of them not supported) and some very early EyeFi generations.
- Those Audio features are for most Digic 4 cams only (exceptions: 50D and 1100D). Digic 5 cams have a very restricted feature set for audio.
Before flooding ML Forums:
- No, your recently purchased cam (all Digic 6, 7 and 8) does not run ML.
- No, we don’t know when it is ready. ML development doesn’t have schedules to follow or release Dates. It’s ready when it’s ready.
- You can support and accelerate porting ML to your Canon cam by offering coding skills and considerable time. Feature set (optimum): C and Assembler for embedded devices, preferable ARM architecture.
- If the project needs financial support the project will tell. Offering Money doesn’t write code lines.
- You don’t have to tell us we’re doing a great job. We had and have that a lot. Haven’t generated any Code line yet. We observed closely!
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Hope the users don’t bother you too much! Rock on!
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As well, CHDK has been around for ages.
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Hey guys, remember when Magic Lantern intentionally bricked everyone’s camera on April Fool’s Day? Good times…
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CHDK is why I buy Canons - easy to use, ton of features, take out the CHDK SD card and my camera is exactly like the day I purchased it.
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To be clear, the makers specifically point out that it is not replacement firmware, but a package of features that runs alongside the OS from an SD card.
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I used to work for Canon when the first digital EOS cameras were coming out. They were cool with CHDK. In fact, they liked it, and parts of their R&D used it. They were initially worried that they would get all sorts of weird support stuff from people who had done weird stuff, and borked their clicky, but this was before the Internet of Things so you couldn’t flash the factory settings from your mobile.
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Hey guys, remember when Magic Lantern intentionally bricked everyone’s camera on April Fool’s Day? Good times…
I do 
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Do you think this (or future big sensor cameras) could ever run the photo software from Google or Apple? When I see what kind of crazy results they get from small lenses and sensors I end up wishing one of them would make an SLR or similar big sensor camera.
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wait, hold on, magic lantern? really?
they could have chosen any other name, but they chose magic lantern?
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I have never gone from “Hey, I should try this” to “No thanks” so quickly.
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Existing:
No. (I can only guess what you are asking for but most things coming to mind are technical impossible, cost megatons of work and/or will get you stopped dead in the tracks by lawyers.)
Best we might be able to do: Some kind of remote control (“tethered shooting” on steroids) from smartphones or other devices via USB/bluetooth/WLAN. Today we can’t even directly access ML menu system via remote …
Upcoming:
How should I know? I’m not that interested in speculations and have no saying in upcoming technical developments.
Lookup open source camera projects for Arduino, Raspberry Pi (and other microcontrollers) as well as other open camera projects (example: Arpertus Axiom Beta. Look at the timeline of this project …)
Thanks for mentioning CHDK!
an early digital back idea…
And persons with no eye for photography will still be just as bad with or without all the latest gimcracks.
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Alas this means that Magic Lantern is not compatible with most Canon DSLR cameras released after 2013. I did like using it for focus stacking with an older camera though.
The Expeed and Digic processors are not high powered chips.
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