Casio QV remote controls

Content

• What is the purpose of this page?

• The Casio QV wired remote control museum

• The matrix

• The serial remote control protocol

• Executing time requirements

What is the purpose of this page?

You own a Casio QV digital camera and you want to know if it is possible to remote control it with a wired remote?
You are interested how the camera could be remote controlled with a serial cable?
You are a software developer and you are interested to write an application for remote control your Casio digital camera?
May be this page is what you are looking for!
This page provides informations about the matching of different wired remote controls to different cameras.
And in the case you are a software programmer you get all you need to write a remote control program for your Casio QV model.
May be these informations concern other 'new' Casio digital cameras too - this has to be proved.

The serial communication protocol is quite simple. It seems Casio engineers provided this simple protocol to encourage software developers to have an easy job writing a remote control software. But Casio didn't publish this protocol on a web page.

The Casio QV wired remote control museum

In the history of the Casio digital cameras there have been produced several (but similar) wired remote controls:

• WR-80QV

• WR-1C
• WR-2C
• WR-3C

Picture © Steve's DigiCams	WR-80QV The WR-80QV was part of the delivery content of a QV-8000SX (released July 1999). As far as I know it was never sold separately. BTW: My interest in Casio remote controls started in spring 2000 when I got a QV-3000EX/Ir (without remote control) and I realized there has been a QV-8000 released earlier with a wired remote control included. So my question was: Will the remote control of a QV-8000 work with my new QV-3000? A nice guy (owner of a QV-8000) was so kind to loan me a WR-80QV. So I could see it's possible to remote control a QV-3000, even with the restriction that some buttons of the control didn't match with the appropriate function on my QV-3000.
	WR-1C The WR-1C was specified to work with the QV-2300UX and with the QV-2800UX and was available separately. It started to be available in the year 2000 (QV-2300 and QV-2800 were released in June 2000).
	WR-2C The WR-2C was introduced 2001 as an optional accessory of a QV-2400, QV-2900 or QV-3500.
	WR-3C The latest control in history is the WR-3C. It was introduced as optional accessory of a QV-4000. There is one advantage of this WR-3C: It can be used by all current (and probably future) QV cameras without mismatch between button label and camera function.

The 3 controls WR-80QV, WR-1C and WR-2C have a similar layout. All of them have 12 buttons and they have nearly identical button labels.

In fact they work identical, because all of them have the same code / button matching.

Because the label printing differs between these controls I introduce a simple number system to identify better a button:

The syntax in this small table is Number - Command.
Both are used in the matrix below. 

The layout of the WR-3C has been reduced to only the half number of buttons - there are 6 buttons now:

The matrix

The following table ("matrix") shows how several wired command controls work together with several Casio QV cameras.

It shows on the left side in the first column C (= command) a command code (A, B, C, ...). This column is only of interest for people with programming interests, most people are users of the cameras and the remote controls - they can ignore this first column with the commnd code. A is the according ASCII code value in decimal numbers.

Then there are 4 columns representing 4 different models of wired remote controls. The columns show a respresentation of all buttons, their position number and the symbol (or text) label.

The next columns represent several Casio QV cameras and their functions.

So the matrix shows the matching between buttons of the wired remote controls to the functions of the camera models.

You can use the matrix to get the answers of questions like "Will the WR-2C remote control work together with a QV-4000?".
In this case you should compare line for line the values in the WR-2C column with the values in the QV-4000 column. The answer will be: "The buttons 'Focus Lock', 'Shutter', 'Zoom W', 'Zoom T', '-' and '+' will work as expected, but the buttons 'Menu', 'Focus', 'Set', 'Flash', 'Shift' and 'Timer' will not result in any function.

Some explanations:
'x / y' means 'x' is processed if the camera is in REC mode, 'y' is processed if the camera is in PLAY mode.
'x <> y' means the command toggles between the two states 'x' and 'y'.
'Focus Lock' is the same as a half pressed shutter button.
'Focus' is represented as a flower symbol and means the switching between the modes 'Automatic Focus', 'Manual Focus', 'Infinity' and 'Macro'.

One more example how to use the matrix:

The matrix was used for programming 'DiCaControl for Windows', a remote control software for all of the Casio QV models mentioned in the matrix. 'DiCaControl for Windows' offers all available remote control functions of the cameras in a Windows program (not only the functions of the wired remote controls) and additional features like time lapse control.
Multiple other remote control software tools are available from other sites.

The serial remote control protocol

Executing time requirements