rLab Show & Tell - Teaching Old Hardware New Tricks

This month's Show & Tell comes from Stephen E about his Magic Lantern project. It is open to the public and will come with a guided tour of the space, and free refereshments. Some words from Stephen E about the project:
"Magic Lantern is a software project that adds features to a wide range of Canon cams, helping them remain useful for longer. You can turn your cam into a real computer, too. I am the lead developer. While the specifics will be about Canon DSLRs, in the general sense this is about hacking software to do stuff the hardware manufacturer left out, or didn't want to put in. Things we can do:

• extend cam capabilities (faster card access, higher dynamic range, longer video record times)
• script custom sequences of commands to control your cam, with no tether (intervalometer, motion detection trigger)
• run arbitrary code, on a device with a very nice image sensor, wifi, and a fast disk
• realtime stream image sensor data to a big server, do GPU accelerated processing, and send the results back
• etc: there is much left to explore

This is mostly software reverse engineering, with some hardware reversing. E.g. cams have a UART with a full debugging shell. Some cams have FPGA. Many mysterious hw accelerators that need understanding... 2nd hand Canons are cheap if you want to join in! https://www.magiclantern.fm/ https://discord.gg/uaY8akC Sample of the work-in-progress dev guide: https://github.com/reticulatedpines/magiclantern_simplified/blob/dev/developer_guide/02_00_hardware.md"