We’ve seen plenty of lens hacks, but [Koray] took things in a new direction. Rather than buy lens chips for modding all of his manual lenses, he added a lens chip inside his Digital Rebel 300D (aka XT). Most of us might cringe at gutting their Rebel, but he performed this bit of soldering surgery on a unit he picked up for £40 and repaired. Excellent work!
Update: yeah yeah, the 300D is the original Digital Rebel.
im a Nikon guy (D40) but he must of had balls of tungsten to open up his rebel :-\ any who this is a nice hack i had no idea u could add that :-)
YAY! I made it to hack-a-day! :-)
@ Koray Congratulation, awesome job on your hack!
yah Koray nice one 5/5
Will,
The 300D is the original Digital Rebel… The 350D is the XT. Just FYI :)
:-) Thanks guys, it was fun.
koray, very nice work, it looks like it turned out well for you.
so the chip is just an serial flash rom?
Hi rasz, I don’t know what type it is, but all it does is to communicate with the camera through a serial connection and report a lens focal length and maximum aperture value. It is basically simulating the original controller chips inside EF lenses. There is not much documentation on this, but there is one commercial website with some info, you may be interested:
http://www.birger.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=ef232_home
Cheers. K.
thanks for the info, the one you linked is reprogrammable
the one you used looks just like a 6 pin SOT-23 serial eprom (34VL02 ?).
Do those chips talk to camera (two way) or just inform the camera what is connected (like SPD on RAM chips in PCs)?
hi rasz, I think it just informs the camera what is connected (i.e., focal length: 50mm maximum aperture:f/2.0). You can order these chips on ebay and even ask for a specific focal length and aperture value pre-programmed for you. even more, there is this dandelion type for olympus cameras, which can be reprogrammed by the user on the go (i don’t know how). Before the proliferation of these chips/adapters, manual lenses (i.e. M42, Zuiko, Nikon ones) were cheap as peanuts. Now the prices are going up and up… Amazing. Cheers, K.