Bluetooth remote shutter
Remote Selfie shutter are really low cost Bluetooth 3 buttons that are really easy to hack for making different applications.
These button can be found on ebay, amazon or aliexpress like following this link for less that 6$. The button is paired to the smartphone and then allow to execute photo shoot without the need of any third party application.
Once you have connected your button to your smartphone, the device is identified as a keyboard. For taking photo, it uses the existing shortcuts like the “sound up” key for iPhone and the “enter” key for the android version. So basically this is a 2 key keyboard and you can capture these key easily from your smartphone app. Depending on the model you are using the behavior is different. As an exemple, the green button you see on top is sending the two keys one after the other. So for each click you have two keys sent : “sound up” and “enter”
another selfie remote command
This other remote selfie is working differently as it is sending the two keys depending on the button you are clicking. You can click up to 10 time a second and it can be detected so you can easily detects double clics, triple clics, long clics. In fact if you keep your finger on the button you will have on message (on key) every 100ms.
On iPhone, bypassing the system “sound up” behavior is not the more easy thing but the use of the “enter” key is more easy.
I have been tinkering with a few of these the past few weeks.
The thought is to link them to a Pi so I don’t need to have my phone as the hub.
Working on some Python to receive their iBeacon codes (the second one in the picture becomes an iBeacon of sorts once you turn it on), but am struggling to capture the button presses.
Nice to see that I am not the only one that thinks these could be a cool cheap option for all sorts of solutions.
Did you have any luck with this? I’m trying to do something similar with python.
The second button in your example also seems to expose enough pins from the chip (www.belon.cn / Uploadfiles/psd/BK3231Datasheet.pdf) to reprogram it, opening up the potential to send other keycodes using some light hardware modding to reprogram it. I have however no knowledge on the difficulty level of flashing the chip, and little documentation beyond the specsheet seems available.