[sane-devel] Getting Clever CAM 360 working

[kilgota at banach.math.auburn.edu]

Martin,

Gerard has given you very good advice. Permit me to expand on it a bit. 
Also feel free to contact me personally, after checking whether your 
camera is mass-storage and after comparing it to the gphoto2 list of 
supported cameras (go to gphoto.org to see that list). If it is not 
mass-storage and if it is not on the list of cameras which gphoto2 
currently supports, then we can soon find out what might be the thing to 
do next.


On Sat, 10 Sep 2005, gerard klaver wrote:

> On Fri, 2005-09-09 at 21:31 -0400, Martin wrote:
>> I have a small pen digital camera, called Clever CAM 360 from
>> TELEBrands, Fairfield, New Jersey USA (which might only be the USA
>> marketing company).
>> I was able to plug it into the usb port on my work laptop running
>> Windoze XP and was able to acquire the pictures from it.
>>
>> Is there a way to do the same the same on my RedHat 9 Linux system?
>>
>
> Check the output from lsusb -v, should show some info,

Yes. If it says Class 08 it is supposed to be mass storage. So in that 
case you should presumably try to mount it as an external flash drive. And 
if it is Class FF (proprietary) then it is necessary to know the rest of 
the output of lsusb -v or lsusb -vv or cat /proc/bus/usb/devices in any 
case.



also check
> your win cdrom for some info files.
>

This is extremely useful advice if it is class FF and is still 
unsupported, because it can tell us which way to go. for example, it could 
be a new camera with a known chip and the INF file could then very well 
say which chip is in it.

> Check also if its supported by gphoto2

If it is a still camera, that is, and is not mass storage. Gphoto2 
specializes in supporting still cameras which use the PTP protocol, or 
which are proprietary. We don't support mass storage cameras on the very 
logical grounds that the kernel mass-storage support already does that.

The camera might well be supported because right now we support over 600 
cameras in libgphoto2. The current CVS tree supports even more, which 
are not yet supported in the released version libgphoto2-2.1.6. If the 
camera is not supported kin libgphoto2, then

--it could possibly be a matter of routine to add its USB Vendor:Product 
number to a driver which already supports cameras with the same chipset in 
them, and then it could very possibly work. To see if this is a 
possibility, it is good to look for clues in the INF files which came with 
the camera.

--it could be an entirely new camera, and then we the gphoto2 people 
hope that you will be serious enough to help us with logging, testing, and 
such.

Not to paint too rosy a picture, it is probably fairly easy to get the 
photo data out of the camera even if it is previously unsupported. The big 
bugaboo is that one sometimes faces at that point an undocumented 
compression codec, which it is only possible to try to solve by guesswork. 
But that is something which one does not know until the problem is faced, 
and it is a problem which does not always occur, so one should not ever 
be pessimistic. And even proprietary compression codecs sometimes must 
surrender when persistently attacked.

and maybe some kernel module?

Needed for webcam support, generally speaking.

Cheers,

Theodore Kilgore