[jamesg]

As for camera makers releasing SDKs, there’s a few, though I’ve found them to be unimpressive (binary only blobs for Windows, etc). However more interesting to me are cameras that speak standard(ish) protocols. I’ve been looking into this recently, here’s what I found: Panasonic cameras (GH4 is the one I’m looking at) expose a HTTP API over WiFi, and are able to upload images to an SMB share while you shoot. The API is fairly extensive: lets you control focus, etc. Nikon cameras have a pretty bad story on WiFi (at least up to the D810, which is the newest one I own), so I haven’t got far with them. I hear, though haven’t verified that Canon cameras speak PTP/IP, which is pretty neat. Olympus also has a WiFi control mode, but annoyingly it seems to disable the on-body controls when you use it (tested on an OMD EM1 Mk 1). I’m yet to get my hands on a Sony camera (will probably buy an A7 later this year), but I’ve seen videos that suggest it should be fairly straightforward to control remotely.

[haldean]

Sony has an Android app you can use to get live previews off the A7, tweak exposure parameters, and trigger images. Everything can go over either bluetooth or WiFi. I imagine that a little time with Wireshark would open an API up real quick :)

[opencl]

Sony already has an API and there are a few third party Android apps using it: https://developer.sony.com/develop/cameras/

[kbumsik]

Very interesting and informative. That sounds relatively easy to reverse engineer the protocol even if they don't document it. Thank you.