Do You Digita?

(The worst thing you can give a programmer; is something you can program!)

The links above take you to pages created by cameras running my script. What is it good for? You may base your next camera purchase on the parameters that are/aren't supported. You may use it to help program your next script for compatibility of several cameras, or like me to see why a feature didn't work.

Finally ! The NEW Script is Ready !

Do You Want to know about my Script?

What got me into programming my camera? There were lots of cool scripts already available, so I downloaded some. I thought I could do those manual SLR tricks since there was a script that let you change the f/stop. I wanted to be able to take those pictures that make waterfalls look like ribbons and where the foreground object is in focus and the background is blurry. But I tried them, and they seemed to operate, it even puts an indicator in the camera display that the f/stop was set, but every picture looked the same, what was I doing wrong!? So I took the big script, and took out what I wanted it to do, and tried to make it run. I got the same results. That's about the time I got a manual from Flashpoint with programming information for the Digita language. I wanted to know why my camera acted like it was gonna do what I wanted, and then it didn't do it!

The first version I wrote got some information from the camera that told me what kind of parameter it was, and what the default value was. It displayed it on the screen for a couple of seconds, and went on to the next. Writing down the results became a bother, so I discovered how the camera could write a file. Since I'm an old DOS dBase kinda guy, the first output was words and numbers with commas between them. I made a database and imported this info into it, and I was able to see at a glance what my camera could do; sorta. I had to tweak it some more, and I started to get info that made sense. I should be able to set my aperture from f/1 to f/40.95, and set the Exposure mode to Aperture Priority. Then, after some more digging, I found out how the camera can tell me what it is programmed to think and I found out instead of Aperture Priority, my camera thought it was External Flash Sync. At this point I had the camera printing lines of information that you could read as text.

So many people were talking about how the camera can make "webpages", so the next step was clear since I was already writing my own website. My first try had boxes of information in a table that was 8 boxes wide in 11 rows. It was pretty easy to read on the computer, but you could only print out about 3 boxes wide and the rest of the information wouldn't get printed.

Now for the final set of revisions, I refined the code that was called over and over again. Originally I just cut and paste the sections and changed the parameter it was calling, this was big and inefficient. Especially if I was gonna try to make the output look more like the Flashpoint documentation, that meant a lot of typing and more cut and paste. The problem is that Digita is not very recursive, you can't tell it to go somewhere and do something and expect it to come back where you want. So there's a lot of code telling it where to go when it finished the code that asked the camera for information and writes to the file. Once I got all this debugged, I was back to writing just plain text, but it looked alot like the documentation, and it had alot of good info. Finally I rewrote it for HTML output so it would look good as a webpage, when you look at these other pages, that's what you're looking at.


Keep reading this next section if you want to know how the code is laid out.

• After initializing the variables it creates the HTML header information.
• Then it gets some Camera and Firmware information, and writes it to the HTML.
• Now there's a big section that sets Parameter variables, the name of the Parameter, Digita defaults, and a short description from the Flashpoint manual.
• After each Parameter, it sends it to the procedure that does all the work, broken out like this:
• Find out what kind of Parameter it is, a single value, an option from a list, or a text value.
• Then if it's a value, it gets the Range the Camera is programmed for, and the default value,
• if it is an option from a list it has to do a bunch of things....
• the default is a number that matches a value in the list, then I get each valid value and the Camera defined description and if it matches the default I mark it with an asterisk,
• if it is a text value I get the Camera default and what the user has set it to (or say Null if it's blank).
• Now I have to go through this long section that determines where it came from by the name of the Parameter and send it back for the next Parameter, and the cycle continues
• Finally when it gets to the last Parameters it writes a few of the tables to the end of the HTML and closes the file.
  That's about it in a nutshell - but trust me, it was a lot more involved!
• UPDATE : Now includes Digita version 1.5 parameters and it is version aware!
  
  
  
  

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