Some notes while playing with WiFi Direct with my Sony ILCE-QX1

ILCE-QX1 Notes

  • WiFi Button in battery compartment cycles between 3 modes. No wifi, Single Wifi and Multi Wifi.

ILCE-QX1 Single Wifi (Direct) Notes

  • In “Single Wifi” mode, the camera advertises a DIRECT:ILCE-QX1 SSID AP and WiFi Direct.
  • To accept the WiFi Direct connection on the ILCE-QX1, hold the WiFi button in battery compartment for 3 seconds
  • Add push button to highest order of preference, otherwise it’ll ask for a pin you don’t know
  • ActionList_URL is determined through SSDP. M-SEARCH for ST: urn:schemas-sony-com:service:ScalarWebAPI:1.

ILCE-QX1 Multi Wifi Notes

  • In “Multi Wifi” mode, the camera wants to connect to an AP as client.
  • I found I can ‘configure’ the settings by WPS PBC.
  • Hold the “wifi” button for a few seconds, the camera starts a slow repeating chime.
  • Press the hard or soft WPS pushbutton and wait for a few secs for a new chime to indicate success.

Windows UWP WiFiDirect sample Notes

  • Pairing status doesn’t seem to be passed back correctly in the DeviceInformationUpdate. It always shows unpaired, but trying to connect again says “PairAsync failed: Already Paired”. Changing the test to if (result.Status != DevicePairingResultStatus.Paired && result.Status != DevicePairingResultStatus.AlreadyPaired) works to continue.
  • “Connect operation threw an exception” is a red herring. The sample is hardcoded to make a TCP connection to 50001. It’s not a WiFi Direct thing received from the peer.
  • There’s also an DeviceEnumerationAndPairing sample with WiFi Direct bits.

Sony Remote Shooting Notes

Sony has a few Remote protocols. The ILCE-QX1 supports Camera Remote API, which uses webtechnologies like SSDP, JSON-RDP over HTTP, etc. Camera Remote API was deprecated on 2020-02-11.

The new Sony Camera Remote SDK, introduced on 2020-02-06, runs over PTP. And the PTP part is not documented, Sony just delivers binaries for Windows, Linux, macOS, implementing their new PTP protocol over USB and IP.