The webcam model Sweex 100K uses the chip Sonix sn9c102 and has the advantage for our USB stacks to support the mode bulk (normally used for big transfers, like with printers or scanners). Other webcams that I found were all using the mode isochronous (small synchronized frames).
As transfers does not use the dedicated mode for webcams, do not expect a high frame rate. There are currently 2 images per second. It could be better activating the transfer of compressed images.
A long time ago, I tried several times to create webcam drivers with the help of Linux drivers. But I found that the USB mode isochronous (used for data streaming) was not supported by our systems. Then, among all my webcams I found one that was supporting the mode bulk (raw data transfer).
I finally succeeded to catch images (yeah !) and I shew this work in progress at the Huno party, in spring 2008. This old webcam was very hard to find and one day there were some available on eBay. What is the interest if I am the only guy that can use this driver ? So I bought 3 webcams for the Amiga market.
Just trying one of them ... I saw that of course the chipset was different ! Let's come back to work, after some time it was working with these webcams too. The program used SDL and was able to save JPEG images. It was rather a developer program with poor GUI and interactive actions to understand the behaviour of the beast.
Finally, I started to write a MUI application that you can try today !
Warning ! After the first webcam I had, I bought 3 other ones and unfortunately, one of them had a third chipset inside ! Its reference is : VendorID = 0x093a and ProductID = 0x2468). It is not supported at the moment. So I have to work on this new one and update the program ... I can't be responsible for an unsupported webcam but I will try to support it if possible.
Here are 2 examples of pictures taken by the webcam :
In the first image, a program after a short night and hours spent to finish this program ! In the second one, you can see a MUI program that displays the picture ! Do you need glasses ? No problem, look at the snapshot here :
You can see that the quality is not so bad even if the guy is so mad ! ;-)
The archive contains both binaries for MorphOS and AmigaOS 4. Sources will be provided in a future version, they have to be cleaned. The archive is put on Aminet to easily count the number of downloads and measure the interest)
A driver is great but it may be hard to find a webcam to buy :-( I don't remember where I bought my first one but others where found on ebay. I suppose only Internet will help you with online shops or second hand specialized resellers. Here is a picture of the box, if it can help (taken with another sonix webcam of course !). If unfortunately you get a webcam that is not supported please let me know.
The Macally webcam can be found on Amazon !
| Sweex Webcam 100K | Macally IceCam Portable |
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