Unleashed app as Snapbridge replacement

[wdaehn]

From a pure technical point of view, I would like to ask "What do we need the unleashed dongle for"?
The only reasons I can see are

• provide the last GPS position in case none is available at this very moment
• To allow timelapse without the smartphone being nearby. The smartphone tells the dongle the settings but the dongle is controlling the camera.

Both valid points in extreme cases, but the app itself is a very nice replacement for the Snapbridge app of Nikon as well. Would love the app to connect to the Nikon Z6 directly via bluetooth, without the dongle being needed.

The problems are clear:

• Nikon does not provide a SDK for Android/Apple
• Nikon does not document the exact behavior of what an app has to do to connect via bluetooth, turn on Wifi, etc.

But we all know it is PTP/MTP commands via USB, bluetooth or Wifi in one form or the other. Since you support these commands via Uart already, it should not be that much work to support direct bluetooth connections as well, apart from reverse engineering the connection.

I would really appreciate that. Ease of use, market opportunities, future developments, cost/margin on your side (app has higher margins than app plus hardware), weather sealing stays intact.

[Andy]

HI wdaehn,

I actually already started reverse-engineering Snapbridge! :) I was able to at least trigger the camera from my phone without the Unleashed. However, I don't think we will support Snapbridge in the app anytime soon. We have our hands full at the moment.

It's also highly unlikely that we will fully support everything Snapbridge does. They use a weird combination of Bluetooth Classic, Bluetooth Low Energy and Wi-Fi to control the camera from the phone.

Moreover, the Unleashed is capable of much more than what Snapbridge can do :) All the auto exposure ramp algorithms for Holy Grail timelapses are built-in in the Unleashed, not in our app. The app is just an interface for the Unleashed, and it has no idea about how to talk to the camera.

[Oliver]

Just a clarification:

our App does not do MTP/PTP over Bluetooth. Our Unleashed does the MTP/PTP communication with the camera via USB, and a completely different protocol without the USB cable, and the App is just a user interface for controlling the Unleashed.

The great thing about this is that the Unleashed can control the camera without the app being connected, and everything - even Auto ramping "Holy Grail" timelapses keep working perfectly even when the Bluetooth connection is dropped, whether the phone battery dies or you go out of range!

[wdaehn]

Mixed feelings.

On the one hand there is no doubt that the unleashed plug has its upsides, like leaving the camera for a couple of hours without app connectivity.
On the other hand, your app so much better than Snapbridge, would love to use that all the time. No problem as long as the plug is connected permanently, but then the camera is no longer weather sealed and the camera's bottom flap is constantly in the way.

Third, it is a business opportunity, what I called margin. At the moment you have as business opportunity only those people who buy the full package. Selling the app by itself because it communicates with the camera directly, would create additional revenue. As said, your app is too good to be limited to a subset of Nikon users.

And finally you would gain a few options as well, like fast image transfer and live view. Cannot be done via the Bluetooth connection but the app talking via Wifi to the camera....

Please keep that thought in mind.