Possible to customize camera firmware?

Question

I have a firmware update for my camera. Would it theoretically be possible to

Decompile it, comprehend it and customize it?

Answer 1

In theory anything is possible. In practice, you might have a hard time. Have you tried throwing your firmware update binary at a disassembler to see if it's real instructions and not encrypted or obscured in some way?

Even if it does happen to be unencrypted instructions, you're going to need to know something about the layout of the file - there aren't many chips out there that can start executing C code right from the reset vector. After that, turing the disassembled binary back into high-level source code is not an easy task. Certainly getting something back that you can easily understand and modify will be a big project... good luck!