[sane-devel] Alaris weeCam webcam

[Theodore Kilgore]

John,

There is a project called gphoto, the mission of which is to provide
support for digital still cameras. Assuming that this camera will take
still photos, I would suggest that you go to the webpage gphoto.org and
start looking around. I suspect that there would be some general interest
about the results of your "guesswork," pparticularly in view of the fact
that you have made it work.

If the camera also can (or only can) operate as a "webcam," then
essentially you want to look at support for it under video4linux, which
would probably involve work on a kernel module. At this time, gphoto
envisions the construction of "userspace" software to access an external
device (for example uses libusb to connect to USB cameras and not a
kernel supporting a particular camera). Also, as I understand things,
libgphoto essentially does not support "webcam" hardware, only still
cameras.

Hope this helps.

Also while we are on the topic of camera support:
Is there anyone on this mailing list who is running libusb and can send me
the output file of "gphoto2 --debug --summary 2>debuglog" for a Jenoptik
JD C350?

According to reports, this is yet another camera using the SQ905 chip (I
am working on the driver for these cameras). The sq905 driver recognizes
the Jenoptik JD C350 but chokes when asked to download pictures. What
little I have seen of the error messages might indicate that the config
info which the camera downloads contains something previously unknown. But
I don't have one, so I can't test it.

Theodore Kilgore


On Sun, 28 Sep 2003, John Coppens wrote:

> Hello people.
>
> I have been experimenting with an Alaris weeCam (parallel port) which can
> be had for very low prices on the 'net. I understand that there are quite
> a few of these cameras around, Earthlink presented new subscribers with
> these things.
>
> I wanted to use this cam on board of a balloon experiment, controlled by a
> microcontroller) and did quite a bit of work to get the thing working
> (capturing ECP data, and I did get it to send me pix under Linux).
>
> Not being an expert programmer, I'm not sure if I'll be able to write a
> real backend or a driver for the cam, but if someone is interested, I'll
> be glad to share the info I have here.
>
> Of course, if someone knows more about the cam, or the QV108-02
> Alaris controller chip, _I_'d be grateful for the info! Most of what I did
> is just guesswork.
>
> John
>
> (This is part of a student project at the University where I teach, and
> here's a bit of info on what I did with the cam - in Spanish though:
>
> http://www.jcoppens.com/univ/circ4/gl4/digicam/weecam.php
> )
>
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