PakkyT
Mu-43 Hall of Famer
? What ? There's a whole Olympus pamphlet on the Air detailing precisely all the comm protocol ! You can barely be more open than that, considering it's also the same protocol used to communicate with all the other models, give or take a small tweak.
Yes, I did not say you couldn't communicate with it. As you mentioned, my complaint was that the things you could do with it were limited to the same things you could do with any of the Olympus cameras with the app. You can do such exciting things /s such as activate the shutter or change some basic settings. Wow! And you were still locked down to the same restrictions as any other Oly cameras (for example, 4 second max exposure time).
Here was a product that looked like it would be perfect for innovative use ideas especially for remote photography or using multiple cameras. But you were limited to only Wifi and Bluetooth control and only could connect to one Air at a time. There is a USB port on the camera which I believe was for charging only; why no direct connection for control? This device seemed like it would be idea to build into something that could run autonomously and controlled by an onboard micro controller but to do that even with the microcontroller sitting right there with it where it would be easy to direct connect, you still had to use radio connections. This camera seemed tailor made to be built into the nose cone of a submarine or rocket. And if you wanted to use two or more of them (front and back of the submarine) you couldn't control both from one Wifi device.
These are some of the reasons why I think the Air ended up being of limited interest to only people who were happy to put it on a pole and use an Android app with it, but not for the people who probably initially looked at it and thought this will be great for multiple camera project or my autonomous device only to find out Oly just put a standard camera in a tube shape and while the form factor was perfect, ability to control it without a smart phone or use more than one was limited.