Intro
As a parent of a toddler, you tend to take many pictures of the shenanigans they get up to. Given the monkey-see-monkey-do attitude they have, it wasn't long before our little one also wanted to take control of the shutter. As we generally use our phones to take those pictures, this isn't always ideal: while the kid generally is careful with stuff, but as a toddler, stuff sometimes gets dropped. Sometimes, it's even worse, and we get our phone back with random timers set and settings changed. To prevent that from happening, we decided to buy a camera specifically for the li'l one to use.
Obviously, a kid of that age doesn't know how to use all the bells and whistles of a DSLR or even compact camera. Luckily, there are a lot of kids on this world with an interest in photography. As such, there is a market for cheap (literal) toy cameras: not many features or bells or whistles, sturdy ABS casing, and cheap enough for it to not really matter if it breaks. I scoured Taobao for one of these, and in the end settled on one that seemed simple enough. I didn't assume the pictures would be any good, but surely the resolution would not be entirely worthless?
After our little one got the camera, turning it on was not an issue: press the button and it works. It was the step afterwards that was more puzzling, however: like many other Chinese products, the manufacturer tried to put lots of features in this camera, and as such it booted up into a menu, with the camera mode being one of the options. Now, if the camera had a touchscreen like our phones, this would not have been an issue, but the menu needed to be navigated using cursor keys and this was a bit too hard for a three-year old living in this modern age.
That got me thinking: Surely there is a way to simply skip the menu and go directly into the camera mode? It's probably some ARM processor inside and I can't imagine they bothered to protect the code, so read it out over JTAG, load it into Ghidra, find the bit to change, flash it back, and we're done, right?
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