GL860 driver progress | dsd’s weblog

I’ve been hacking on the webcam in my System76 laptop. Here’s what I can get under Linux:

There seems to be an element of software-handled synchronization I have yet to understand. And who needs colour anyway?

6 thoughts on “GL860 driver progress”

Patrick 30/03/2008 at 6:54 pm

Looks like you’re getting somewhere :-)

I’ve got deep respect for your craftsmanship!

Patrick

Stuart Longland 01/04/2008 at 10:12 am

Hi,

Can’t help you with the sync issues, but it’s quite possible that the colour is handled by a Bayer Filter. It’s quite possible that the driver does this colour decoding, rather than the firmware on the device.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer_filter

Regards,
Stuart Longland

Daniel Drake Post author01/04/2008 at 12:13 pm

Thanks Stuart, I’ll look at that. I was looking at YUY2 colour space encoding too, as that’s what the windows util I am sniffing says it is capturing in. (it also gives the option to capture as I420)

The other confusing thing is the amount of data. The windows util that I’m sniffing is capturing and displaying at 640×480, but the distinct blocks that come back from the device under this util are 640×480 *bytes* in size. I’m not really sure how it is possible to represent colour with 1 byte per pixel. Unless the real res is 320×240 and it is upscaling + interpolating in software, giving 2 bytes per pixel in the image data. Or maybe I should consider multiples of these data blocks per frame, giving e,g. 2x640x480 bytes, but that seems unlikely…

The sync problems are fixed btw. I read more about isochronous I/O and learned that I need to submit multiple simultaneous USB requests to make sure that one is always ready to go if the device is ready to send data.

Marius P 01/04/2008 at 5:22 pm

Hi Daniel,
we good effort !!!
I have an Asus S37 and using Linux mint (ubuntu 7.10) with skype 2.0.
This is integrated very well and works, only not the camera.
I am already waiting 4 months for an update of ubuntu, as it was announced the new kernel would provide new driver. However, I tested all alfaÅ› and beta’s. Nothing worked.
So I am very glad you are working on the driver.
Hope you will be able to provide a installable package, precompiled.
I am not that good in compiling.
Good luck, I will be checking your website regularly for any progress.

shah 02/04/2008 at 8:40 pm

Hi,

I’ve got also a S37 laptop from asus.

I’ll wish you all the best to make this webcam works!!!!

the webcam under windows working well, so under linux it will work even better :)
I will check your blog regulary :)

cheers!

Manuel 20/10/2008 at 1:56 am

Thanks very much!!
I have got the 0503 model and did the “./install a” option on a medion 96420 and have got picture!!

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