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The app and the T (technical)


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We all know that the T and the app have some problems connecting and maintaining connections. Someday I'm going to have to do a full reverse engineer of the protocol. I wanted to take a selfie today and put the camera up on a tripod and wanted to use the app to trigger it. For whatever reason it wouldn't connect and so after I did the selfie the old way with the self timer I fired up a packet sniffer to see what is going on.

 

As far as I can see for as far as I've gotten, the camera is actually doing the right thing and the problem is actually with the iPhone app.

  1. I can watch the camera get a DHCP IP address
  2. I can see it uses the MDNS protocol multicast  also known as Bonjour in the mac world to announce its presence several times.
  3. Meanwhile, I have the app running on my phone and I'm watching the MDNS announcements roll by in the protocol sniffer and the app sits there saying, "looking for camera..." Several times I've seen the MDNS announcements go out and the app didn't register them. 
  4. Eventually the camera goes to sleep.

This could be a problem with iOS or it could be a problem with the app. I don't know, I don't do iOS but looking at the packet dump so far, I think the reason why we haven't gotten a firmware update to fix the problem is because the problem isn't in the firmware. The problem is in the app.

 

This makes me more curious than ever. I'll have to spend more time working on this and hopefully get the app to connect, then I can do a full reverse engineering of the protocol.

 

If anyone else runs linux and can run wireshark and can capture the interaction when the camera does connect. Let me know, I'd love to take a peek at what is going on or collaborate on reverse engineering the protocol between the camera and the app.

 

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We all know that the T and the app have some problems connecting and maintaining connections. Someday I'm going to have to do a full reverse engineer of the protocol. I wanted to take a selfie today and put the camera up on a tripod and wanted to use the app to trigger it. For whatever reason it wouldn't connect and so after I did the selfie the old way with the self timer I fired up a packet sniffer to see what is going on.

 

As far as I can see for as far as I've gotten, the camera is actually doing the right thing and the problem is actually with the iPhone app.

  1. I can watch the camera get a DHCP IP address
  2. I can see it uses the MDNS protocol multicast  also known as Bonjour in the mac world to announce its presence several times.
  3. Meanwhile, I have the app running on my phone and I'm watching the MDNS announcements roll by in the protocol sniffer and the app sits there saying, "looking for camera..." Several times I've seen the MDNS announcements go out and the app didn't register them. 
  4. Eventually the camera goes to sleep.

This could be a problem with iOS or it could be a problem with the app. I don't know, I don't do iOS but looking at the packet dump so far, I think the reason why we haven't gotten a firmware update to fix the problem is because the problem isn't in the firmware. The problem is in the app.

 

This makes me more curious than ever. I'll have to spend more time working on this and hopefully get the app to connect, then I can do a full reverse engineering of the protocol.

 

If anyone else runs linux and can run wireshark and can capture the interaction when the camera does connect. Let me know, I'd love to take a peek at what is going on or collaborate on reverse engineering the protocol between the camera and the app.

 

I use Linux, have a T and have access to an iPhone. There is a chance that I can support your activities.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I can connect the Leica T to the App (on IPad ). At forst everything seks to work fine. But after aprox. 30 seconds i get a run time error. The camera disconnects then. This happens over and ove again.

 

Have anyone experiencend the same probleem? 

Can i fix this?

 

Thanks in advance.

Jeroen

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  • 2 weeks later...

As a brief update, I saw that the Leica Q app evidently isn't working under iOS9 and so I thought that I would give the Leica T app a go. Under iOS9 I have been able to connect several times without fail. I basically wasn't able to connect to the camera and had almost given up trying using iOS8.?? So that suggests to me that the problem might have been in iOS not in the app or the camera. I had been pretty sure that the problem was not the camera after looking at the packets that  it was sending when my phone was failing to connect.

 

However, I need to run wireshark on a real machine rather than on a virtual machine because the packets that contain the exchange of protocol seem to not be passed up from the hypervisor to the virtual machine. So I haven't yet gotten a good sniff of the protocol between the app and the camera yet. However, now that I can reliably connect to the camera that becomes much easier. It just requires time.

 

I just need a few cold rainy weekends when the weather discourages me from going out and I should be able to reverse engineer the protocol. ;-) Hmm which is more fun, taking pictures or staring at packet dumps in hexidecimal?

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Other way could be to work with T's web server

 

When you activate wifi you can start the web content and it gives you the web address you can browse to

 

That won't need any packet sniffing or deciphering as it is just http web protocol and you can just get the images with get protocol, the only thing would be to screen scrape to get the image address

 

I use mainly the web browser as I just download a few pictures with the phone and it is a lot more reliable

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  • 2 weeks later...

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