Magic Lantern Team Cracks The Canon 7D

Many 7D users never thought they would be able to run Magic Lantern on their cameras like their friends did with their other Canon cameras. It was thought that the firmware of the camera was just impossible to crack. Then yesterday the magic lantern team said they had made the first successful patch of the 7D.

For those of you unaware, Magic Lantern is a third party add on which you install onto your camera and it gives you a whole bunch of new controls for making videos on your DSLRs, it is extremely handy for film makers. The video above shows Magic Lantern successfully running on a 7D, note there is no audio to the video.

Here is the official statement from the Magic Lantern team.

Yes, that’s true. Our young team member g3gg0 did the impossible, and solved the 7Dpuzzle within days of receiving the camera from Trammell Hudson (on September 12).

Background: Trammell Hudson started to port Magic Lantern on 7D three years agoWhile he was able to run user code using the firmware update procedure, he was not able to run it in parallel with Canon firmware – which was required for Magic Lantern to run as an add-on software, without replacing the main firmware. Since then, we hadlittle or no idea about how to solve this puzzle, until last week, when g3gg0 had an Aha! moment and discovered how to load Canon firmware from autoexec.bin code.

The first analysis shows that porting is straightforward (more or less), and most features will work without major code changes, as Magic Lantern does not have to run on both DIGIC processors. Basic features such as zebra and focus peaking are already working, so you may expect an alpha version to be available soon.

Are there any of you still interested in a Magic Lantern port for the 7D? Please let us know by supporting our work!

via Planet5d