Olympus D-320L

I just got myself a cute little Olympus D-320L digital camera.

I couldn't find much official information on the Olympus D-320L's upload/download protocol. To help fellow Unix-users out, here are links to what I have been able to dredge up on the net.

Unix Upload/Download software:

DOS/win/nt Upload/Download software:

The one distressing thing about this camera (and I'm told all digital cameras) is that it eats batteries like you wouldn't believe. The Olympus recomended AC adaptor C6AU is rated 2 Amps, 6.5 Volts DC. A typical set of fresh alkaline AA's will only last 50 indoor shots. After about 30 shots the camera will start complaining. Some people recomend using either 4 AA nicads or NiMH internally. I decided to go the deluxe route and construct a 6.0 Volt external battery pack out of (5) 1.2 Volt, 4.5 Amp-hour D-cell Nicads. Even at the full load of 2 Amps that should last a bit over 2 hours.

The power plug I use for my camera is a Radio Shack 274-1570-A 5.0mm/1.6mm plug. Its not a very well constructed plug. If anyone knows a sourse for a better made plug, please let me know.

After a few months of using the external pack I eventually also picked up two 4-battery sets of Radio Shack's NiMH AA and the 1 hr. smart charger (number 23-405). The charger uses the delta-V method of determining when the batteries are charged, and it has a fail-safe timer set to kick in if something goes wrong (and the delta V dip is missed somehow). The batteries do indeed charge in about 1 hour and are barely warm when they come out of the charger. The charger does top off the batteries with a really low trickle charge (actually a pulse every few seconds), so if possible I'll let the batteries trickle charge over night. I don't believe in recharging partially discharged batteries. I just keep one set in the camera until it is fully discharged and keep the other battery set fully charged and ready to go. NiMH only have ~400 charge cycles in them. Why waste them with mis-begotten chargers that "cycle" (discharge) batteries before charging them?

The camera will download jpegs that contain both an embedded thumbnail of approx. 4k bytes and some ascii string data describing the time/date and the camera settings used to take the picture. (sample pictures) I haven't been able to figure out how to extract the thumbnails from the main jpegs yet. The ascii string data was extracted using strings(1). A more elegant solution would be to grab the data with a jpeg groveller that understood Olympus's APP12 jpeg marker. The photopc package above has such a tool (epinfo), but it must be hacked slightly to understand the Olympus-specific string that is part of the APP12 marker.

The time that the camera displays on the LCD and stores in the jpeg is essentially Unix time (eg. seconds since the epoc). The only twist is that this epoch is based on local time not UTC. (Strictly speaking the camera time can of course be set to UTC. Since there isn't any documented TZ register and subtracting the UTC offset in one's head is a royal pain, most folks will no doubt opt to set the camera to local time and not UTC.)

My camera runs Unix

According to a posting by Juri Munkki, the camera has a SPARC chip in it.

    From: jmunkki@alpha.hut.fi (Juri Munkki)

    The cameras in the Olympus, Sanyo, Epson, Agfa, etc. family all use
    the Fujitsu chip set based on a SPARC processor, so they share at
    least large parts of the firmware. Given that Unix is the primary
    operating system for SPARC based computers, I'm not surprised that
    the unix time measurement system (minus TZ) was used.

Hey guys, I want access to the raw interface:

    ifconfig lens0 f2.8 1/60 up