Kodak DC3200 Serial Protocol

Updated December 12 2002

I reverse engineered this protocol by capturing serial port communications with the camera, and over a period of one or two months, and many pages of printouts, finally got something working. It grew to the point it is now, where I'm confident it works as well as the Windows application.

This collection of software has been unmaintained for some time now. I don't plan on updating any of it, except for the photoreceiver, mostly because this camera really isn't that good, and furthermore, I no longer own one.

The standalone driver for Windows listed below has an unfortunate bug in it. Packets are sometimes sent twice from the camera and my driver at the time did not check if a packet had been received already, so it just blindly appended it to the image. This causes odd little blocks and artifacts in the resulting image. There is updated code in gphoto2 that handles this correctly. It just took me a little while to discover what the bug actually was, and by then I didn't want to update anything other than the gphoto2 library code.

The protocol specification below is far from complete. I believe I've implemented everything that the DC3200 Windows application does in the gphoto2 library. I assume that if you're interested enough in the protocol, you are smart enough to scour the source and map it out for yourself.

• The protocol (incomplete)
• Standalone driver for windows * (downloads pictures from camera and sends to photoreceiver)
• Photoreceiver for linux (receives files)
• Photoreceiver for windows (receives files)

* For the latest DC3200 code, please check the libraries included with gphoto.

Reverse engineering of the Kodak DC3200 Serial Protocol by Donn Morrison.

Email: donn at donn . dyndns . org

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