Sony RX100/Tweak
For many years I have owned the handy and powerful Sony RX100 M4 camera that I like to keep in my pocket during travels.
Before I had the M1 and someone will remember that I had updated the firmware from Linux with Virtalbox.
Today I discovered an application that allows you to add interesting new functions to the camera as well as unlock others that limits its use. The great thing is that it works on Linux as well.
Software that interfaces with the camera is Sony-PMCA-RE
HowTo install Sony-PMCA-RE on Arch Linux:
This tool interfaces with Sony digital cameras through USB. It allows to tweak settings, dump firmware, and in some cases install custom Android apps.
This is an experiment in a very early stage. All information has been found through reverse engineering. Even though everything worked fine for our developers, it could cause harm to your hardware. If you break your camera, you get to keep both pieces. We won’t take any responsibility.
https://github.com/ma1co/OpenMemories-Tweak
Unzip Sony-PMCA-RE-master folder on your home.
Type the following commands from Linux terminal:
$ cd ~/Sony-PMCA-RE-master
$ pip install -r requirements.txt
Connect your Sony camera
Connect now your Sony RX100 camera (or other supported model) to PC via USB cable.
It is possible to use Sony-PMCA-RE-master from command line or through a more practical graphical interface:
$ ./pmca-console.py # for the command line application
$ ./pmca-gui.py # for the gui application
If you encounter the error:
ImportError: libtk8.6.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Install tk and run again (gui):
# pacman -S tk
$ ./pmca-gui.py
Interface is structured in a very simple way:
- Camera Info: displays Model, Product code, Serial number and Firmware informations.
- Install app: allows you to select, download apk and install listed applications or upload new ones manually (FocusBracket, TimeLapse,Tweak, dof-math..).
- Tweaks: click Start tweaking (updater mode). You can then use the checkboxes to configure your camera’s settings.
- Remove the 30min video recording limit
- Unlock the language menu
- Disable the NTSC nag screen
- For developers: Enable telnet and adb daemons
- Update Firmware: Sony cameras can boot from a secondary partition for firmware updates. Using a custom firmware file, we can execute code in this mode. Note that the camera firmware itself remains untouched. The firmware update process is only used to execute custom code.gen4 models are not compatible, since their firmware is cryptographically signed.
Run new installed applications on Sony camera
From Sony camera menu it will now be possible to access list of new installed applications to use them and unlock various functions using OpenMemoriesTweak.
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