http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/arduino-control-of-a-camera-lens

Vladimir-- built an Arduino-based pass-through ring (translated) which intercepts automatic lens controls. It’s meant for use with the Canon EOS lenses which have their own electronics allowing control of things like focus and zoom.

It seems like part of the motivation here was to uses the lenses with other brands of cameras. But Vladimir does also talk about the possibility of improving on some of the sensors that don’t perform well in certain climate conditions (think of how crystal oscillators will drift as temperature changes).

The machine translation is a bit rough to follow, but it seems the adapter ring still uses the settings sent in from the camera but has the Arduino clone to translate them into a format that the lens is expecting. In addition to this there is a set of buttons on that small PCB beside the lens which allow for fine tuning the aperture.

Here is the Russian link if anyone can translate or extract better info:

http://www.ixbt.com/digimage/canonautosonyl.shtml

It would be nice to translate GH-2 lens focus commands to say Canon. Then we can have our autofocus and aperture control on a wide range of adapted lenses.

Maybe a Russian speaker can e-mail him to see if he can adapt to M43 to canon rather than Sony to Canon.