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Full autofocus and aperture control of Canon Lenses on GH-2 with adapter
  • disneytoydisneytoy

    This comes from:

    http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/arduino-control-of-a-camera-lens

    Vladimir-- built an Arduino-based pass-through ring (translated) which intercepts automatic lens controls. It’s meant for use with the Canon EOS lenses which have their own electronics allowing control of things like focus and zoom.

    It seems like part of the motivation here was to uses the lenses with other brands of cameras. But Vladimir does also talk about the possibility of improving on some of the sensors that don’t perform well in certain climate conditions (think of how crystal oscillators will drift as temperature changes).

    The machine translation is a bit rough to follow, but it seems the adapter ring still uses the settings sent in from the camera but has the Arduino clone to translate them into a format that the lens is expecting. In addition to this there is a set of buttons on that small PCB beside the lens which allow for fine tuning the aperture.

    Here is the Russian link if anyone can translate or extract better info:

    http://www.ixbt.com/digimage/canonautosonyl.shtml

    It would be nice to translate GH-2 lens focus commands to say Canon. Then we can have our autofocus and aperture control on a wide range of adapted lenses.

    Maybe a Russian speaker can e-mail him to see if he can adapt to M43 to canon rather than Sony to Canon.

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  • 11 Replies sorted by
  • Alfi666Alfi666

    Nice, but all I see is aperture control thru arduino... so no Zoom, focus or IS.... and not controlled directly from camera, but from the microswitches.

    But anyway, nice

  • disneytoydisneytoy

    Incorrect. It is a translator. Camera sends signal focus out, arduino converts that to Canon signal focus out. Lens sends signal it is at 70mm lens, arduino translates that to M43 signal to camera.

  • Alfi666Alfi666

    Well, if I look at the backside of the adapter, I don't see any contacts to the camera - do you? And the microswitches 3,4 are mentioned on the page as "aperture open, close"

    Anyway, I don't see any translator here, just a controller

  • Mr_MooreMr_Moore

    I’m sorry to disappoint you, @disneytoy, but that’s not a translator. The device only controls the aperture of some EOS lenses.

  • disneytoydisneytoy

    I read " the adapter ring still uses the settings sent in from the camera but has the Arduino clone to translate them into a format that the lens is expecting. In addition to this there is a set of buttons on that small PCB beside the lens which allow for fine tuning the aperture."

    Maybe Vitaliy or someone who reads Russian can read the original page and report back.

  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    @disneytoy

    This guy is known for making low quality and hard to explain DIY things.
    He openly states that this thing burned few lenses and is working very problematic with most others.

    Anyway, it can be interesting info, but only for really die hard fans.

  • disneytoydisneytoy

    Thanks Vitaliy for checking it out. I still think with an arduino, you could find the commands coming from the GH-2 to the lens (aperture, focus in and out) and translate them into Canon lens.

    You just have to learn the commands being sent. I don't think M43 specs are in the public for lens communication. Obviously, with RED and the other Canon adapters the proper commands have been extracted.

  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    @disneytoy

    Thing that you want to do require work of 3-10 engineers for few months. may be more, looking at the others similar adapters.
    Thing described in this article is DIY in its worse - very hard and time consuming to reproduce and badly working.

  • Mr_MooreMr_Moore

    @disneytoy

    I read “the adapter ring still uses the settings sent in from the camera but has the Arduino clone to translate them into a format that the lens is expecting.”

    Sorry, I’m not seeing that in the Russian. I guess both Hack a Day’s and DIY Drones’s wishful thinking and Google’s (I assume) machine translation got the better of them.

  • sumosumo

    Interesting concept and in theory it would work but I don't think its as simple as it seems on the surface. Also that adapter thing has no contacts on the m4/3 side of the mount as mentioned above so it can't be a translator type device. It would be interesting to see how AF would perform with such an adapter too.

  • nomadnomad

    RED has spent quite a bit of engineering time on making their Canon adapter (more than a year!). It's great, better than Canon, actually. But it costs 500,- U$ in Au and 2.000 in Ti.

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