Casio EX-FH100 and EX-F1 Shutter Release/Video/USB Pinout

I love the Casio EX-FH100. I hate proprietary bullshit. It’s tremendously aggravating when a manufacturer arbitrarily makes up a new connector — especially when we have perfectly good standard connectors already. Proprietary bullshit stokes my rebel spirit, makes me fighty, makes me hack.

I know there’s plenty of interest in this information. I know because I, for one, was interested, and went looking. I found that people had discovered a few interesting things — among them that the remote for the F1 also works with the FH100. I also went asking for help from people close to the problem — and got zero response, which also aggravates the hell out of me. But I have a somewhat exaggerated ability to transmogrify aggravation into positive action. So action, it is. To be clear- this is no great hack. Rather, it is the inverse of a labor of love.

Gather your tools.

Make a micro-probe from a single strand of wire.

Get your fighting knife and cut in.

Check the silkscreen. Pinout:Half_Shut, Shutter, and GND. But we already knew that. How do they correspond to the pins on the connector?

Probe it. Continuity between pins in the connector and traces on the circuit board, that’s what we’re lookin’ for.

The shutter release cable:

The video cable:

The USB cable:

It is interesting that there are several pins which are not used in any of these three functions. I’d be surprised if they didn’t put the camera into some kind of service mode or something. Also, given that the pins are populated on the video cable, it seems possible to create a shutter release using that cable if you don’t have one, even though you’d probably have to cut all the way down to the connector to access those pins.

That’s all for now. Will cross-post this since it is camera related.

There are a bunch of higher-resolution images, including images of the EX-F1 and EX-FH100 connector here.