This tutorial will show you how to get your CHDK-enabled camera connected to your ArduPilot Mega (APM) without buying any extra hardware or decoding PWM outputs. You might want to make this connection to take advantage of the camera trigger function based on distance covered, to ensure a certain overlap and to avoid excessively high overlap. This modification is not necessary, if you have a CHDK camera and want to keep it simple, you won’t gain much by switching to this method right away.
For this tutorial, I’ll use an SX260 HS but this should work equally well on any CHDK-supported Canon Powershot camera. You’ll need just the supplies below to make the cable. The SX260 uses a USB Mini-B connector. Most Powershot cameras come with a USB cable, you can just use that one to be safe.