I've been trying to answer this exact same question. In fact I asked
this question here a few weeks ago. I ended up taking Henry Hallam's
suggestion and buying a USBwiz:

http://www.ghielectronics.com/USBwiz.htm

This provides a USB host interface on one end and serial/I2C on the
other. And an SD card interface as a bonus.

If you're looking to interface to cameras via USB you really want to
take a look at libptp. This has code to control cameras via USB.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/libptp

It may help you to know that Canon cameras generally have good support
for control via USB. Not all cameras do.

Cheers,
Zik

On 27/06/06, xkrja <kristian.jaksch@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
> I'm new to this forum and also fairly new to microcontrollers but I've
> understood that the PIC controllers are one of the most common so thats why
> I'm here.
>
> What I would like to do is to create some kind of interface that let me
> control a digital camera through its USB-port. Not all camera functions are
> necessary to control, but for example shutter, aperture and zoom and maybe a
> few more. The controlling should be done with some kind of simple keyboard.
> So, a schematic idea would look like:
>
> keyboard -> PIC controller -> USB host -> camera
>
> I know that there are software for controlling cameras from the computer but
> beacuse I will put everything in a Underwater Camera housing I'm not able to
> bring the computer.
>
> Are there suitable PIC-controllers for this kind of applications? Are there
> PIC's and USB-hosts already in the same circuit? Maybe some kind of kits
> available? Is this a very complicated thing to do?
>
> Thanks a lot for your help!
>
> /Kristian
> --
> View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/-PIC--Control-digital-camera-t1849719.html#a5049407
> Sent from the MicroControllers - PIC forum at Nabble.com.
>
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