I’m just starting to play with the CHDK firmware addon on my Canon SX100IS. The camera is good enough even if pictures are a bit noisy.

I bought a 8 Gb SDHC card of class 4 which is fast enough for pictures recording and I did the following to install the CHDK firmware addon with autoboot method.

On my computer, my sd-card reader create /dev/mmc* devices.

First step is to create 2 partitions on the sd card. The first one will be FAT16 and contains only the data needed to load the chdk firmware at startup, like /boot on linux. In my case, I set the size of the first partition to 16Mb, but anything big enough to store the firmware is fine. The second partition in FAT32 will be used to store the pictures/videos from the cam.

$ fdisk -l /dev/mmcblk0
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/mmcblk0p1 1 8 17670 6 FAT16
/dev/mmcblk0p2 9 3521 7763730 b W95 FAT32

and of course format the created partitions.

$ mkfs.vfat -F 16 -n boot /dev/mmcblk0p1
$ mkfs.vfat -F 32 -n data /dev/mmcblk0p2

mount, copy the content of the downloaded tarball and umount.

$ mkdir /media/boot/
$ mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 /media/boot/
$ cp -r DISKBOOT.BIN CHDK/ vers.req PS.FI2 /media/boot/
$ umount /media/boot

The PS.FI2 file able the “Firmware Update” option from the original Canon menu in PLAY mode. So, … update it …

Once you’re done, press the <ALT> button, in my case the ‘Print’ button, and ‘Menu’ button. A menu appears and select the ‘Make card bootable …’ from the ‘Miscellaneous stuff’ option.

Shutdown the camera, lock the sd card et restart the cam. CHDK should be automatically loaded at camera startup.