The Reverse Engineered Lytoctrl Aims to Put Lytro's Ill-Fated Light-Field Cameras Under Your Control

Semi-pseudonymous maker Aleks, also known as "ea," has gone on a deep-dive into the inner workings of the ill-fated Lytro light-field camera — releasing software to allow owners to unlock the device for programmatic control.

Ren Ng's Lytro launched in 2006 to develop commercially-viable cameras based on light-field, or plenoptic, technology — capturing not just a single two-dimensional image of a scene but data about the light field including ray direction and intensity. While more complex than a traditional camera, a light-field camera can do tricks impossible with a normal camera — including changing the focal point and depth of field of an image after it's been captured.

Lytro launched its first camera in 2012, using an unusual flashlight-style design with a lens at one end and a display at the other. A higher-end design followed two years later, designed to address complaints about the low resolution and visual fidelity, but high pricing and poor real-world performance meant the company closed in 2018 after a failed attempted to repurpose the technology for use in virtual reality data capture.

With the company gone, Lytro's processing software is no longer receiving any updates — which is where Aleks' deep-dive comes in. "The software was pretty bad, the camera was trying to solve a problem that didn’t exist and the whole endeavor mostly failed," Aleks writes. "Although it failed as a commercial product, [the] Lytro camera has some pretty nifty tech (only one of which is very high optical zoom). It is my hope that somebody out there has a cool idea that would benefit from having full software control over the camera."

Before delivering that software control, though, Aleks had to figure out how the devices worked. Taking a unit apart, Aleks was able to create a break-out board for easy access to an internal UART — then decoded a copy of the firmware archived by a fellow Lytro fan. While what appeared to be commands were discovered, the UART proved unresponsive — so Aleks turned to the camera's USB and Wi-Fi interfaces instead, figuring out a way to unlock the camera for remote control.

"With ability to unlock the camera over Wi-Fi," Aleks writes, "and with combined ExecCmd and SerialSync commands there’s no need to open the camera or do any physical modifications in order to explore the built in shell. Some of these [commands] are pretty interesting. Some I haven't yet come around to figure our (there seems to be a panorama mode!). We can control zoom and focus, we can telecommand the camera to take a photo and we can stream live view which can be fed into computer vision algorithms."

Aleks' full write-up is available on GitHub, with the lytroctrl Python software in a separate repository under an unspecified open source license.