Subject: Usb Pen Camera
From: Mike Barsalou (mbarsalou@aidea.org)
Date: Tue Jan 08 2002 - 10:01:37 AKST
An employee brought me a pencam to play with on our Linux machine. Although
it didn't work right off the bat, it wasn't hard to get it working. Here is
a rough set of steps for what we did:
We plugged the unit into the machine and looked at the logs:
tail /var/log/messages
In the log it said that the device wasn't recognized. That prompted us to
go to the vendors website and look for linux drivers...no joy. We then went
to dejanews (www.dejanews.com) and typed in "+pencam +linux". In looking
through the different postings we found a website that had a driver. So we
went there (http://personal.mia.bellsouth.net/clt/k/j/kjsisson) and
downloaded the source code for the driver.
We unpacked the tar package:
tar -zxvf pencam (then I used the tab key to fill in the rest)
This unzipped the file into a directory.
We then read the README file and looked at the other files that were there.
The README referenced needing the libusb libraries, but said most distros
have them already installed. I choose to just try compiling first. No joy.
So I went to www.rpmfind.net and typed in "libusb" and downloaded the source
for the rawhide 1.0 package from RedHat. After downloading the source rpm,
used the rpm command to get the info:
rpm -ivvh libusb [tab key]
This stored the files in /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES/libusb.
I then compiled the libusb library:
./configure
make
make install
Went into the tests directory and used the testlibusb program and verified
that it returned the device id found earlier in /var/log/messages
Then, using vi, edited the /etc/ld.so.conf file so that the computer could
find the newly created library. This was added to the file:
/usr/local/lib
Then to register the newly compiled library, ran ldconfig, like this:
ldconfig
Next, re-compiled the pencam software:
make
This create an application called pencam. To run it, do this:
./pencam
up came a nice text based menu of choices. We downloaded the pictures and
it stored them in my home directory.
I used nautilus (that's kinda like Windows explorer) and all the thumbnails
showed up. I was able to use Electric Eyes to get a closer look at them.
Max time to getting it working: 15 minutes.
Anyone else?
Mike Barsalou
Copyright Mike Barsalou @ 2001
This archive was generated by hypermail 2a23 : Tue Jan 08 2002 - 10:11:45 AKST