Here’s a little story about a cam named Jed…

Or something like that. Anyway, yesterday afternoon I decided to take a stab at bringing a webcam online. Any webcam at all. First I went to that wonderfully-supported but broken-thanks-to-DLink DSB-C300. Still broken, in that the kernel module sees it just fine but it hoses the entire USB system within mere seconds of use.

Fine, we’ll try the Logitech cheap-o-cam. Yes, the latest CVS drivers can indeed talk V4L to it, and it still provides the yellowest, grainiest image known to camkind.

After a frustrating hour spent on each of those devices, I went online in the faint hope that support might be emerging for the Intel PC Camera Pro attached to Ryoko. What do you know, there is such a project. Too bad it’s in such miserable beta that the best I could get from the cam was a really washed out greyscale image.

And then the jackpot: A userspace app that snags raw image data from my prized 3Com Homeconnect! But wait, that’s at home…

I dragged the little black beauty into the office this morning, and after recompiling the kernel so I could get the USB /proc stuff to work I was able to snap images. Yay!

As an extra bit of fun, I hacked up a little script and an fcron job that takes snapshots every minute and saves them to a specific file on the test server I’m using.

Another couple hours of puttering around with this thing, and I may even be able to put up a webcam link again. I’m probably going to spend time trying to make the image a little bit prettier and making a proper web interface to it.

And up from the Web comes a bubblin’ crude…