@shaddack wrote:
Just hack the hell out of the stuff and take the additional features by force if they don't want to give them to us peacefully. I hear @fuzzyfungus way too well.
The Canon CHDK works on many older models and allows precisely these add-ons. We need more of the same on more cameras and more brands. Or, you know, modchips - possibly daughterboards with different microprocessor but identical pinout in form of e.g. a strip of flexible polyimide foil with soldering spots matching the BGA pinouts of the most common camera processors. Desolder the old one, attach the new one, and voila, much higher model with opensource software. The imaging chips are usually built around relatively standard interfaces, and a FPGA with support for LVDS lanes could interface with them fairly easily; same goes for the displays and the buttons are trivial. Reverse-engineer what goes to which pin of the CPU, and let the FPGA with an add-on processor or SoC (or even internal "soft" one programmed in the FPGA, depending on the cost of either solution) do the rest.
Given that there are way fewer interfacing standards to CMOS sensors, displays, and memories, and only a few major camera controllers, the modkit could be relatively universal, differing only in configuration of the pins and the polyimide foil adapter...