CF U1-DSLR camera control project.

I got my first U1 coming. $35. It's a mk1
Came with both batteries, but no SSD or caddy.
Scored an 80gb MSATA for $18.
Got a WWAN board for another $10. Plan on adding a M-PCIE to SD adapter on it.
According to model number it already has GPS in it.

Not sure if I will go with Win7 or Linux.
I am building it for use as a DSLR camera remote control. Going to use liveview for previewing shots.
U1 tethered via usb cable.
Nikon has the Camera Control Pro 2 software which seems nice enough. I would get total control of the camera on the U1.
I stumbled across a Linux program called Darktable which might do what I need.
Linux would run very nice on this U1.

 

Nikon Camera Control Pro 2 software remotely controls most functions of Nikon digital SLRs from a computer that is connected via USB cable or though wired or wireless LAN using a wireless transmitter. Advanced functions of the D3 and D300 cameras such as the Viewer for preview and selection of images prior to transfer, LiveView function and Picture Control System are also supported, along with the workflow of Nikon’s exclusive photofinishing software Capture NX (optional) and the browser and viewer software View NX.
Take Control of Your Photography – Remotely

Using the USB or FireWire cable that are included with your camera, or the optional Wi-Fi adapters for select models, Nikon Camera Control Pro enables you to capture unique images no matter what the subject.

LiveView Support
Live previews direct from the camera are supported on the D3, D700, D300, and D90 when this feature is enabled. See what you are about to shoot!

Improved Graphic User Interface
Camera Control Pro 2 provides a simulated camera LCD panel on the computer screen which performs the same function as the cameras display. It has been modified to be consistent with those used in the latest cameras for smoother operation.

Picture Control Utility
In certain Nikon digital SLRs such as the D3, D700, D300 and D90, customized image adjustment — including tone compensation curve data — can be saved to tailor the camera’s behavior to the photographer’s vision, improving efficiency when using multiple cameras at the same time.

 

This looks interesting for $40.

 

http://www.darktable.org/
How to Remote Control Your Camera with Darktable on Linux
We've talked about Darktable before, because it is a wonderful advanced RAW photo editor and workflow manager. My current favorite feature is tethered shooting, which is connecting a camera to your computer and controlling it with Darktable. Obviously this is not very convenient for hiking or street photography, but for studio and tripod work it's the bee's knees. There are two scenarios where this might be useful to you.

If your camera has Live View, then you can control it from Darktable and preview and adjust images on your Linux PC. This makes Darktable a great tool for staged macro photography, astrophotography, portrait photography, and for getting the best composition and most accurate focus on long telephoto shots.
--------------------------------------------------------------
Entangle is for Linux too.
https://entangle-photo.org/

Tethered camera control and capture
Entangle provides a graphical interface for “tethered shooting”, aka taking photographs with a digital camera completely controlled from the computer.

News: 10th October, 2017: Release 1.0, “Lithium”, is available to download

Using Entangle is as easy as 1,2,3…

1. Connect camera
2. Launch Entangle
3. Shoot photos

With a sufficiently capable digital SLR camera Entangle allows:

• Trigger the shutter from the computer
• Live preview of scene before shooting
• Automatic download and display of photos as they are shot
• Control of all camera settings from computer

 

So it looks like I will try a flavor of Linux on the U1.

I will need to search for a photography aimed distro.

 

Maybe
Fedora Design Suite

 

Not sure the lack of 3d acceleration will matter for my use.
I can be certain that I will never do 3D work or any game on it. Well maybe solitaire.

I had planned on trying slight overclock as your other thread talked about.
Wonder if the SD card in the WWAN slot adapter can be used for Readyboost in Win 7?

 

Some photos to give an idea of the size.

 

The caddy for a CF U1 and a cool 4 sided photo.
My eagle eye friend Jeff figured that the pic on the graph paper is 1/2 blocks and gives an idea of the size of the caddy.

 

Sent you a Pm. Got a spare caddy. Got other random parts as well. Think i have a spare camera for a U1 as well. Had thought about trying the H2 updated camera software on the U1 Mk2 of mine like Toughbook did on a H1 or a 19 a few years ago for better camera control on the U1. I know you are trying to get it to a external camera. You can also use the factory camera flash as a flashlight.

 

Internal camera/ flashlight would be really handy.
On my 19 or 31, I used the newer software package. Think it was the 31.

 

Some quick LIVE USB OS tests. These ran on it. Distro needs to run on i(x)86 not just x86 or 32 bit.
I just tested for boot/load, mouse/touchscreen and a quick opinion on looks and ease of use.
I tested nothing else.

PearOS 8
Porteus
Zorin12 Lite
MX 17
Antix
Pearl 3.5

 

These booted and loaded
Pear OS 8--Identical to Apple/Mac OS X. Beautiful. Easy to use with touchscreen. More icons than menus.
Pearl OS 3.5- Looks very nice- lots of included software. Looks very similar to OSX
Antix 17 i386--probably 2nd fast--
Porteus LXDE 4.0 i586--3rd fastest --top taskbar--sightly difficult to find things
Porteus MATE 4.0 i586--fastest to load --bottom taskbar--easy to find things
Zorin-OS-12 4-Lite---Boots and works. Probably the slowest load time. Shows the battery level of my wireless mouse!
MX 17 i386---Medium load time--looks ok. Side taskbar is not really a favorite of mine.
Peppermint 9 i386--Looks ok, medium load time- Shut down button did not work.

The touchscreen did work but the calibration was way off on the edges of the screen. I used a usb mouse. This seemed to be on all distros.

These did not load on U1.
Puppy Linux TAHR
Deepin 15
MacPup
Fedora-Design suite-
Elementary os-0.4.1-stable.20180214

 

I guess to be fair I need to boot my live Windows usb stick also.
I know I have live Win 7. Not sure if I have live Win 10.

 

Ubuntu 18.04 has this problem, but 16.04 the touchscreen worked and calibrated perfectly. Possibly something in new kernel modules?

 

Interesting.
I won't make any real judgement until I actually install them on the SSD.
A live usb may not be exact on small details such as calibration.

 

Extreme frustration at the moment.

 

this

 

And this.

Based on Ubuntu 13.04. That was a can of worms.

I did the set-up via an installed version of Pear OS on a CF-52. All the synaptic work, adding xinput and xinput calibrator. Set bios to Touch. <<<<<<<<<<<<<(note: xinput and xinput calibrate showed up in the package manager after we installed the old versions from the repositories.)

Used "REMASTER" to create an .iso. of my tweaked unit. Copied the .iso to a CF-53 running antiX Linux.

After several failures I went back to the terminal.

Code:

sudo cp -i custom.iso /dev/sdb

Read this as: supervisor copies with interaction the iso file to the USB stick. No Unetbootin, no rufus, no nothing.

The touch is micro-spot ON after calibration....including the upper toolbar area that was not reachable with other flavors of Linux. Don't know why, it just worked.

 

You have been hanging around Linux forums too much my friend.
We need more information.
I found Remaster and figured out to run it in terminal.
Then the help file popped up with correct syntax to get custom.iso creation started.
Now for the lack of details part.
--------------------------------------
sudo cp -i custom.iso /dev/sdb
-------------------------------------
This is creating a Live usb, correct?
What were the failures? Copying the iso to usb? Installing the iso to a new machine? getting the live usb to run?
Is this run on the source machine that created the iso?
Does this get the iso from the Pear source to the usb stick? If so, why won't a filemanager copy to usb work?
Is this run on the target machine to install custom.iso?
Are you creating a dual boot with AntiX and Pear?

 

I swapped the Intel 5100 card for the Intel 6300. I was going to use a 7260, but Pear OS doesn't have drivers for the 7260 card.
At first I did not ground the 3rd antenna to the metal housing. Once I grounded it, wifi performance improved greatly.
I had to do the pin 20 mod for any new card to be enabled.

 

The failure was me having too much info. I expected the drive (sdb1) to not work due to missing stuff as has been the case before. I tried Unetbootin, USB creator (MX) and others. Finally I fell back to an old post from somewhere that used cp.

I put a drive in sdb1 (usb) ...it had a OS on it but the sudo cp did what it is supposed to do. It copied a byte by byte copy of the iso file over the existing system file thus doing away with formatting etc.

This is run on any Linux machine that has the custom iso in the PWD. (present working directory) of the terminal.

Code:

$ls

like dir in DOS.

1. Do remaster.
2. Copy .iso to a larger machine running linux... on the Desktop is good.
3. Open terminal.
4. cd Desktop
5. ls
6. If you can see custom.iso then run the command on a freshly inserted USB stick.

Code:

 sudo cp -i custom.iso /dev/sdb

NOTE: USB device may be on SDC or something. It depends on whether you have other sticks plugged in.

OR, handle it (writing the stick) like you would any other .iso file.

There is no reason Rufus wouldn't work; it just needs the iso file available. I didn't choose to use a Windows machine.

IF YOU GET A MESSAGE LIKE "ARE YOU REALLY SURE YOU WANT TO COPY OVER SDA" SIT ON YOUR HANDS AND EVALUATE." Sda is your hard drive.

sdb IS NOT A TYPO. THIS WILL FAIL IF YOU USE sdb1. By using sdb the entire stick will be overwritten. Using sdb1 leaves the first bit of the stick alone....therein lie dragons...like partitions, boot records and such. IF you are using a used stick.

No I didn't dual boot. ANNNND I set the OS up with all updates and upgrades, xinput, xinput calibrator and the tweaks we decided on PM. All that, on the sacrificial lamb (CF-52 GUNBR2M) touchscreen of course. Then ran the stick in the U1.
Actually I copied the .iso to a MX-17 CF-53 and did the terminal commands to copy (cp) from there but that's beside the point.

 

CF-31 GPS works in a CF-U1 MK2 bios and all. Stuck it in the empty hdd bay. Literally stuck with double sided tape. Hdd cable is taped off.

Ran MX-16 Linux/.wine/Winfast Navigator. For testing purposes only.

The mobo connector is under the USB. Blue side of the fpc goes towards the motherboard.

Waiting for parts for my SSD mod.

 

So how do you DELETE the custom.iso from the original unit? Mine won't let me delete it from the GUI.
Related squirrel. Isn't there an app that adds a line in the GUI menu to "open terminal window in this folder"

 

Code:

sudo nautilus

# then trash it. You will have root access until you close the file manager.

I prefer thunar file manager as you can get root access while the file manager is open.....except HERE. That was the trade-off for the top bar being the same on all applications I'm guessing.....IOW it looks different than I'm used to.

I installed it (thunar) and the 17 other packages.

 

The dual pass thru on a U1 is the same as on a G1.

 

CF U1?XXXXXX
?=
A,C,E,F = Mk1
G,H,J,K,M= Mk2
N=Mk2.5
R,T,Q=Mk2.6

 

I figured I should actually connect my camera and make sure this works before I get deeper.

So far
CF U1 mk1
Pear OS 8
Entangle .5
Nikon D300

It does remote control the camera and I can take photos using the U1.
I still need to learn more about the software. I should load it all onto a larger machine to make it easier to learn.

 

You got that part right. I think we will set them up better if we do it on a normal keyboard.

RE: ENTANGLE Did you install with the 5.0 tar from the website or through package manager?

Testing the water on using the buttons App 1.2.3 4. Just skimmed the surface, then the printer died....so I fixed that. It's still acting squirrely. But working.

 

Entangle through Pear software installer or Synaptic.
Interesting on the buttons. panasonic (Mk1 anyhow) uses a Windows application to set them up. You must be doing something custom in Linux.
I am curious.

 

From online information, these seem to be the best to go with on a photography based Linux system.
Don't know if these are possible on Pear 8 or not.
I tried to list them in order of importance to me.
I have not tried all of these. I just compiled the list from various reviews.


Digikam looks to be a very good overall program. https://www.digikam.org/

Entangle is best tethering (remote camera control). https://entangle-photo.org/

Darktable for editing. https://www.darktable.org/

Rapid Photo Downloader Handy for simple organized transfers. https://www.damonlynch.net/rapid/features.html

Photoqt looks great to show off photos to others. https://photoqt.org/feat/

GIMP For more intense editing. https://www.gimp.org/

 

Wifi speed with intel 6300 and 3 antennas.

 

Installed an Intel 7260 into the mk2

 

I did switch back to Windows 7 on the U1.
We tested probably 2 dozen distros.
Linux distros are close, but not close enough for the specialized small screen of the U1.
Panasonic has some very nice "drivers" for the U1 buttons.
One is a scroll button and another is a zoom button.
Then we have the 4 customizable buttons. N
None of the buttons work in any Linux.

My next step is to try some OSX skins on win7.
I want to get a Dock type program and a Launcher so the all my programs(apps) run from large icons like in OSX.

I am investigating a few now.

 

Here's one image anyway.

 

Win 7 on a U1 page from Panasonic

http://pc-dl.panasonic.co.jp/itn/support/win7info6_u1_ssd16.html

 

Macos transformation pak on W7

 

Very nice.

Sarah came in with ALL my squirrel packages.

CF-U1.2 (my numbering) OEM gps is rolling and scrolling on the usb stick/wine/Navigator.

Need to check out WWAN.

Extremely nice condition for the hours. Looks like it was babied.

SSD conversion scheduled for tomorrow.

 

I am gathering parts to attempt a M.2 drive in a U1.
Stay tuned.

 

compare

 

Some quick photos with camera and software.

 

I am having misc errors with the custom sata conversion thingy.
I have a stock caddy coming to see if that solves the problems.
Reminds me of the ide to sata conversions we tried on CF29's.
Those adapters were not reliable either.

 

Here is a bump to this thread with a custom bios splash screen by Shawn.

Thanks friend.

 

Progress.
FPR for a CF 19 works on a U1.
Now to find my CF 19 schematics.

 

Success.
BEWARE, FPR port is 3.3volt and not 5volt.
I tried a usb wireless mouse and it worked fine on 3v.
I will find a 5volt power source to avoid future issues.
Camera,GPS, or existing usb port are all possible sources for 5volts.

 

Here's Shawn's latest splash page on my UI MK1 /GPS/ Camera/ MX-17 Linux w/.wine......in the dock.

 

More work on the 2nd usb port.
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