Tuesday, March 15, 2016

DSLR Dashboard

I have a Nikon D5200 DSLR. It comes with a feature that lets me remotely control the camera via wifi broadcaster module. The speed is slow. The accompanying software is very limited.

DSLR Dashboard is a big step up for the software side. I can plug in the wifi module into the camera and connect to it with my tablet and use DLSR Dashboard to control the camera. But, the speed is still slow and the connection distance is pretty slight. More than a couple yards and you're dropping your network connection to the camera.

I read about using the TP-Link MR3040 portable router as an alternative. The router is $30 bucks on Amazon. It's small and has a good battery life. After the first charge, I ran it unplugged overnight and it was still running after eight hours.

Adapting the router for use with DSLR Dashboard running on my tablet, and eventually a Linux laptop, has been a good learning experience. The data rate between the tablet and the camera is about three times what I get from Nikon's wifi module. I haven't tested using the system in a daily workflow, but that is the goal. The question it needs to answer is, 'can I go into the field with the camera and shoot HDR images of interiors and process them on the spot quickly and consistently?'

Simply shooting a well exposed image and finishing it properly in Darktable or a FFMPeg script is the most straightforward and easiest process. HDR adds some value maybe? Meets some expectation? Meets an expectation that coming? Is already an industry standard? Not sure about all that yet. Trying to think ahead, I guess.

This is how to do it.

http://dslrdashboard.info/

https://downloads.openwrt.org

https://wiki.openwrt.org

Easy Way


Hard Way