September 22, 2022

Sony A6600 Mirrorless Camera - remote control

I have a Sony RMT-DSLR2 infrared remote sitting here next to me, but we are not talking about that, yet anyway.

ESP8266

Take a look at this Hackaday article: The original article is in German. The camera is a DSC-HX90V, which is some kind of point and shoot. It turns out to be all about HTTP and JSON. The user interface is a single pushbutton, so apparently the only function implemented is tripping the shutter (which for me might be all I wanted).

Sony apparently does document an Android API for doing such things. He says he did use a Wifi packet analyzer, but gives no details. Another fellow (also German) had implemented a Time Lapse app, which was a useful source of information.

Bluetooth

You can also buy (for $80) a dedicated bluetooth remote (the Sony RMT-P1BT). Or any one of various clones for $30, such as this one:

Cell phone control via blue tooth

The first step is to install "Imaging Edge Mobile" onto my Pixel 6 Android phone. An aside: Why does Google call their site for this the "Play store"? It makes me feel like they don't take this seriously, like they view their phones as silly toys.

I say "no" to letting it send me notifications, agree to the usual license, and now it wants me to log in to the Sony site (I have no login). It asks some information questions and then tells me it wants to start scanning for nearby devices.

Now on the camera, under Network2 I ensure Bluetooth remote control is off.

Now I go to the camera, and under the "world" tab find "bluetooth settings" and turn bluetooth on. Nothing ever happens. This does not work.

Supposedly my camera can connect to my phone via bluetooth and get GPS data, but I have not been able to make the pairing happen.

Try Wifi

The Network1 menu has an entry "Control with smartphone". The middle entry in this menu has a rectangle with the word "connection", click on this. After a delay, a QR code is displayed.

Now on the phone with imaging edge use "connect to camera". It will activate the camera and then when it sees the QR code in the center and in focus it will tell you that it was seen, but then everything seems to shut down and nothing useful has been accomplished.

Why doesn't any of this work?

I have a Pixel 6 running the latest Android (14 I think), perhaps this is not yet supported by imaging edge? The Sony website shows imaging edge mobile as working on Android 8.0 to 12.0

Maybe my camera needs a firmware update. Setup 6 has "version". It shows ver 1.10 and lens ver 01 (for my 16-70) This is an ILCE-6600. The Sony website shows 1.10 as the latest firmware.

Feedback? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Digital Photography Info / tom@mmto.org