Contributing To The Chdk - Canon Camera Hackers Manual

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A P P E N D I X
A.4

Contributing to the CHDK

The CHDK is a large community effort, and there are many ways of contrib-
uting to this project. It doesn't have to be core development—there are
many other areas where you can contribute. People who adapt the CHDK
to a new camera are always needed. Each year, Canon comes out with a
bunch of new models that are not yet supported by the CHDK.
Besides the camera itself, the first thing required for porting the CHDK
to a new camera is a dump of the native camera firmware. This may be easy
to obtain by using CardTricks (section 3.2) for dumping directly from the
camera. For many cameras, however, it may be necessary to use a hard-
ware-based method and dump the firmware through the blue LED. De-
tailed instructions for different firmware dumping methods are found at
http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/Firmware_Dumping.
In the next steps, the firmware is analyzed. The hooks where the CHDK
can lock in must be found. Some of these hooks must be searched for
manually by inspecting the code. Others can be found with the help of a
tool, Signature finder (finsig/gensig). The mapping of keyboard functions
to buttons must be adapted for the specific camera model, too.
You should have basic knowledge of the C programming language and
the ARM assembler language if you want to take on such a task. Because all
CHDK functions must be tested on the new camera, some time and effort
are required. For more information, please see
Porting_the_CHDK.
There are other areas, too, where contributions are welcome. Improving
the documentation, writing tutorials and articles, implementing tools and
utilities, and last but not least, creating novel and useful scripts, are all
valuable contributions. Even filing a bug (appendix A.2) helps improve the
software.
http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/