There are a wealth of camera projects to be found for those that don’t mind tearing apart some of their more valuable possessions, and this isn’t the first we’ve seen involving the hacking of the Canon protocol. All the information is in a GitHub repository, so the curious hacker can roll their own. The Canon lens protocol has been extended since the 1980s, and the commands for different generations of lenses can be convoluted. An STM32 does the hard work and talks to the outside world through a USB interface, however it’s in the software that the real effort lies. The hardware is a 3D printed lens mount with a PCB that mates with the pins on the lens.
Can they be used outside the confines of the camera they were designed for? If the user is then certainly, because he’s created a nifty USB adapter and mount for Canon lenses for use with his custom streaming camera. But as cameras have embraced electronics ever more, technology has found its way past the lens mount to the extent that all features of a modern lens are electronically controllable. There was a time when a camera lens was simply a set of shaped pieces of glass in a tube, with a mount and an aperture.
