24May Android Cellphones could be your next field monitor.
I was catching up on my tech news this morning and had a chance to watch Google’s keynote on Gingerbread and HoneyComb. If you’re not sure what those two names mean, basically they represent the next round of operating system upgrades for mobile Android devices like the Motorola Xoom tablet and the HTC thunderbolt.
As I watched the keynote this morning I heard something that made me rewind and play it back again. Google will be introducing USB host control to the next generation of Android devices. That doesn’t sound like a huge statement until you think about something like the OKII USB Fallow focus.
The OKII usb fallow focus uses a USB host controller with a cheap Arduino open source chip to control your Canon camera. Add a host controller to your phone and with a little software you could control your camera just like the OKII’s fallow focus.
There is also a video stream coming through on that usb cable and many phones have a resolution of at least 800×480. New phones have 1ghz and dual core processors crammed into them which should be more then enough power to handle streaming video from a camera and give you control over operation at the same time.
I don’t have the programming skills to patch something like this together but I’m sure someone does. The Canon USB SDK is easy to get a hold of and the new android SDK is also easy to find. I hope someone with some Java programming experience gets to work on this. I would be more then happy to pay $20 for an app that turns my phone into a monitor slash camera controller.
May 25th, 2011 at 3:30 am
Brilliant! Talk about coincidence, this topic has been creeping around my mind for the last week! I’m really looking forward to a controller like this;)
June 11th, 2011 at 8:13 pm
Imagine having the iphone 4’s retina display as a small monitor, or even a big EVF
August 21st, 2011 at 10:26 pm
[…] few months back I wrote a post about the possible use of android devices as a Camera monitor slash controller for your Canon DSLR. It only took about 3 months for the guys over at dslrcontroller to almost […]
August 27th, 2011 at 10:42 am
I just wrote the people over at Idisplay an email asking for this exact feature, hopefully I will hear back from them soon. I found them at shapeservices.com. why should we buy monitors and pads as well, when the Android has a great resolution and is open source.
I would easily pay $20 for a great working app to turn the Android into a Field Monitor!
October 23rd, 2011 at 1:51 am
“I would be more than happy to pay $20 for an app that turns my phone into a monitor slash camera controller.”
As would I!!
(as long as they don’t get greedy and charge, like, $50 lol)