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This is a fresh driver for the Minolta Dimage V camera, which has since been
discontinued by Minolta. This driver contains no code form my earlier efforts.
The assistance of Minolta was very helpful in writing this driver; I was given
a copy of the specification and told that I could "share it with the Linux
community". I am interpreting this "sharing" as the GNU GPL. Minolta takes no
responsibility for the information they provided me, which is perfectly fair.
Please see the file COPYING for more information.
Copies of the Dimage V transfer specification are available under the
aforementioned "share" clause; I will mail them globally, and fax them
anywhere in the US or Canada. A lot of the information is in the code
itself, but sometimes the real spec is nice so readers can find my bugs.
Minolta has made it clear that they do not wish to release further protocols,
and recommend that users of unsupported systems purchase SmartMedia readers
to transfer images.
This library is far from complete. There are plenty of places where better
sanity checking could be done. I will continue to work on it until I buy a
newer camera ;>
Notes on specific functions:
The capture function takes a picture, downloads it, and then deletes it.
This image is always named dv00000.jpg, since that holds with the naming
convention for the rest of the pictures, and simultaneously cannot be a
valid name for an image retrieved from the camera. Sometimes the deletion
of an image will fail after it has been retrieved; since reporting this
error would mean the entire capture process failed, I merely print a
message indicating which image needs to be deleted. This is, in my
opinion, preferable to losing the picture entirely.
The camera_init() function attempts to set the camera clock to the current
system time. If it fails, the init function can still succeed; I do not
believe that failing to set the clock should mean failure to initialize.
The same is true of the camera_exit() function.
At long last, the preview thumbnails finally work! The strange distortions
that were occurring previously have been eliminated, and I have been able
to retrieve accurate thumbnails reliably for the last several hundred
images. This puts this driver as the first that I know of that handles
the Dimage V thumbnail format; there were other programs to connect, but
all (including my earlier attempts) just gave up on the retrieved data.
More information on the file format can be obtained in the code itself.
Deleting all images is now implemented correctly. This beats iterating
across all of them, hands down.
Here are the pinouts for the serial cable:
_____________ /-----\
\ 5 4 3 2 1 / / X X X \
\ 9 8 7 6 / | 2 5 3 |
--------- -| 8 7 |-
-----
--Gus Hartmann, <gphoto-dimagev@gus-the-cat.org>
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