The brainchild of the folks at HDR Labs in conjunction with Steve Chapman from the infamous Gentle Giant Studios, this cool hacking tool, the Open Camera Controller (OCC) rose out of their need to break free of the limitations of their Canon DSLR while shooting HDR (High Dynamic Range) images for film production. The OCC uses an old Nintendo DS to control the functions of a Canon DSLR. It also reportedly supports Olympus and Sigma.

The good news doesn’t end here as they documented the whole process, it is possible for those of you skilled in such things to build your own controller.

Here is the direct link to their instruction page:  http://www.hdrlabs.com/occ/hardware.html