Hello. I have a Canon M10 and I would dearly like it to work with Ekos.

The situation is more complicated than it being an issue with gphoto. These cameras are actually well-supported by gphoto2. The reason for the crash is the camera firmware itself, which is not supported by the Canon API.

These cameras are designed to be controlled by a smartphone app over WiFi using the PTPIP protocol. This works very well - a gphoto-based app can change settings and operate the camera remotely when connected via WiFi. This is done by manually passing the port (in the format “ptpip:xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx”) and camera model string to gphoto on connection, then it works normally. Unfortunately the Indi driver does not have a way to override the port and camera model, it only connects to cameras it detects via USB.

These cameras have no USB support. Gphoto2 has reverse engineered some kind of USB connection but you can only trigger the shutter and it is impossible to change any settings, otherwise the camera will crash. This is what the OP is seeing.

CHDK firmware DOES allow a USB connection, but I believe it requires use of the CHDK API. I don’t believe Indi uses this API.

I think the easiest way to support these cameras would be to allow users to manually override the connection port and camera model, which would allow WiFi connections. There might be other issues though, because these cameras are missing some other functionality such as a true bulb mode.

Another approach might be a CHDK driver of some sort.

Or finally, some kind of simple bridge driver that can send commands to a script that calls the gphoto2 or CHDK command line tools directly.

Read More...