That must have been a few years back. I think you're talking about enabling "camera bootflag". We provide an automated way to do this for new installs on release builds, but don't like to make this too easy before we have stable builds ready. People do the weirdest stuff, including trying to flash firmware that's not for their cam, in order to run an ML build for that different cam...

Anyway, I can happily talk you through how to do it. Our discord is probably easiest, or you can ask on the forum. Discord is linked from the forum: https://www.magiclantern.fm/forum/

Whatever code you had back then won't build without some updates. 4000D is a good target for ML, lots of features that could be added.

5D3 is perhaps the best currently supported ML cam for video. It's very capable - good choice. Using both CF and SD cards simultaneously, it can record at about 145MB/s, so you can get very high quality footage.

Re what we can support - it's a reverse engineering project, we can support anything with enough time ;) The very newest cams have software changes that make enabling ML slightly harder for normal users, but don't make much difference from a developer perspective. I don't see any signs of Canon trying to lock out reverse engineers. Gaining access and doing a basic, ML GUI but no features port, is not hard when you have experience.

What we choose to support: I work on the cams that I have. And the cams that I have are whatever I find for cheap, so it's pretty random. Other devs have whatever priorities they have :)

The first cam I ported to was 200D, unsupported at the time. This took me a few months to get ML GUI working (with no features enabled), and I had significant help. Now I can get a new cam to that standard in a few days in most cases. All the cams are fairly similar for the core OS. It's the peripherals that change the most as hardware improves, so this takes the most time. And the newer the camera, the more the hw and sw has diverged from the best supported cams.

The cheapest way for you to get started is to use your 5D3 - which you can do in our fork of qemu. You can dump the roms (using software, no disassembly required), then emulate a full Canon and ML GUI, which can run your custom ML changes. There are limitations, mostly around emulation of peripherals. It's still very useful if you want to improve / customise the UI.

https://github.com/reticulatedpines/qemu-eos/tree/qemu-eos-v...

Re docs - they're not in a great shape. It's scattered over a few different wikis, a forum, and commit messages in multiple repos. Quick discussion happens on Discord. We're very responsive there, it's the best place for dev questions. The forum is the best single source for reference knowledge. From a developer perspective, I have made some efforts on a Dev Guide, but it's far from complete, e.g.:

https://github.com/reticulatedpines/magiclantern_simplified/...

If you want physical hardware to play with (it is more fun after all), you might be able to find a 650d or 700d for about $100. Anything that's Digic 5 green here is a capable target:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Canon_EOS_digital_cam...

Digic 4 stuff is also easy to support, and will be cheaper, but it's less capable and will be showing its age generally - depends if that bothers you.

Strange, it certainly can do sub 5s on some bodies. But I don't have a 5d2 to test with.

Could this be a conflict with long exposures? Conceivably AF, too. The intervalometer will attempt to trigger capture every 5s wall time. If the combined time to AF seek, expose, and finish saving to card (etc) is >5s, you will skip a shot.

When the time comes, compare the price of a used 5d3 vs a shutter replacement on the 5d2, maybe you'll get a "free" upgrade :) Thanks for the kind words!

You're a better photographer than I am. I'm glad if ML helped you.

Please recruit your programmer friends to the cause :) The R7 is a target cam, but nobody has started work on it yet. There is some early work on the R5 and R6. I don't remember for the R7, but from the age and tier, this may be one of the new gen quad core AArch64.

I expect these modern cams to be powerful enough to run YOLO on cam, perhaps with sub 1s latency. Could be some fun things to do there.

Ah I'd love an astro conversion.

I've had a fun idea knocking around for a while for astro. These cams have a fairly accessible serial port, hidden under the thumb grip rubber. I think the 6D may have one in the battery grip pins, too. We can sample LV data at any time, and do some tricks to boost exposure for "night vision". Soooo, you could turn the cam itself into a star tracker, which controlled a mount over serial. While doing the photo sequence. I bet you could do some very cool tricks with that. Bit involved for a first time project though :D

The 6D is a fairly well understood and supported cam, and your compiler background should really help you - so really the question is what would you like to add? I can then give a decent guess about how hard various things might be. I believe the 6D has integrated Wifi. We understand the network stack (surprisingly standard!) and a few demo things have been written, but nothing very useful so far. Maybe an auto image upload service? Would be cool to support something like OAuth, integrate with imgur etc?

It's slow work, but hopefully you don't mind that too much, compilers have a similar reputation.

I have been toying with the idea of picking up an old 1D. I can't remember the guy's name that I saw do this, but he had his 1D modified to use a PL mount instead of an EF mount. Something about the 1D body (being thicker I guess) allowed for the flange distances to work out. He then mounted a $35,000 17mm wide angle to it. That lens was huge and could just suck in photons. With that lens, he could expose the night sky in 1/3 second exposures what would take multiple seconds on my gear. He mounted the camera to the front of his boat floating down river using night vision goggles to see where he was going. The images were fantastic. I always wanted to do something crazy like that

Canon have never had any contact with ML project for any reason, to the best of my knowledge. The decision to stay away from 1D series was made by ML team, I would say out of an abundance of caution to try not to annoy them.

The 1Ds3 still renders wonderful images but the UI feels so limited now. ML would transform it.