Topic: webcam connected directly to Chumby

Has anyone tried this?
How would I start putting logitech webcam drivers on to a chumby and play the output locallyyy?
Can I modify the internal webserver to serve up local webcam images?
Any suggestions on using a chumby as a webcam server?

thanks

Re: webcam connected directly to Chumby

Basically you'll just have to locate the driver for the webcam in the kernel sources (if it's a kernel-space driver). After that, it's a matter of building it, moving the driver onto Chumby, loading it into the kernel, and setting up some program to deal with capturing the images from the camera.

Logitech's cameras are reasonably well supported by the OSS community, but to really find any more information about it, you'll have to google for it.

Displaying the images locally can be done just by dumping the image into the framebuffer, or you can do it a bit smarter by making a Flash widget view the Chumby's own webserver, and serving the images from there. Something to keep in mind: Chumby doesn't have much room for persistent storage, so you need to be smart about how you're storing your webcam images, if you're going to be doing it locally and not on an NFS server. Also, if your camera uses Video4Linux, you're probably going to have to rebuild the kernel (someone else could back me up here, I haven't delved through the kernel .config yet).

3 (edited by radiorental 2007-03-16 05:25:31)

Re: webcam connected directly to Chumby

thanks, havent done any linuxdriver work.  Should be interesting. 

I think I will have to "do it a bit smarter by making a Flash widget view the Chumby's own webserver" As the pitch I put in to get the alpha prototype was this:

Child's toy which has a webcam + chumby.  Acts as a baby monitor - parent use PC to watch kid via embedded webcam.
But I'm beginning to this this is going to be a tall task for both my skills and the chumby's horsepower. 

I might scale this back to a toy that displays their parent while the parent is still in front of a web cam at work.

If anyone here is interested in the webcam linux drivers I'd really appreciate working with you.  I'm happy collaborate via an instructable and have credit given where its due.

Thanks for your help, now I understand what I really need to do

take care - pauric

Re: webcam connected directly to Chumby

http://forum.chumby.com/viewtopic.php?id=321