EDIT (05/21/09): The instructions here are obsolete. Click here for an update
The Imaging Source recently released a series of USB CMOS cameras. Unfortunately, these cameras are not fully USB Video Class compliant so that the cameras do not work correctly out of the box. The work on the unicap support for these cameras is still in progress but the software presented on this page should at least allow users to use the cameras in most applications.
Updating the Driver
As the camera is not fully UVC compliant, the uvcvideo driver to drive the cameras needs to be replaced with a patched one. The steps to update the driver are the same as in Installing USB Cameras but you need to use the following driver:
uvcvideo_r262_p1_euvccam.tgz
Updating unicap
I made an intermediate release of unicap which contains the changes required for the CMOS cameras. Currently, only the source code package is available:
unicap-0.9.4.tar.gz
Using uvcctls
The uvcctls tool is required to configure the driver. Without this tool, there is no control over the frame rate.
To use this tool, install and load the driver from above. With the camera connected, call the tool as follows ( as root! ):
python uvcctls.py tisEUVC.xml
There is currently one issue with this tool: It only works once after the driver is loaded. When the camera gets disconnected and reconnected, the driver needs to get unloaded and loaded and the uvcctls tool needs to be run again to get the frame rate control back.
uvcctls0.2.tgz
Color Interpolation
Most of the CMOS cameras do not do the RAW Bayer pattern interpolation. Instead the host computer needs to compute the color from the RAW pattern. To see a color image in UCView, you can use the following plugin:
ucview_debayer_plugin-0.1.tar.gz
To install the plugin, just configure it with the same prefix as you configured UCView ( or use /usr if you installed from a package ). Eg: configure --prefix=/usr. After installation, make sure the plugin is enabled in the 'Plugins' tab of the ucview preferences dialog. You will get a new entry in the 'Tools' menu to enable/disable the interpolation. You can configure the interpolation via the 'Configure Plugin' button in the preferences dialog.
The support for the TIS CMOS cameras should get better in the near future. Currently there is an alternative for the uvcvideo driver in heavy development which should fix most issues.
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I am trying to get this drive to work in 8.10 and before installing this driver I installed the latest uvcvideo. I can build and install the driver but if I do modprobe I get:
FATAL: Error inserting uvcvideo (/lib/modules/2.6.27-11-generic/kernel/ubuntu/media/drivers/media/usbvideo/uvcvideo.ko): Unknown symbol in module, or unknown parameter (see dmesg)
and dmesg reports:
[441559.508487] uvcvideo: disagrees about version of symbol v4l_compat_translate_ioctl
[441559.508497] uvcvideo: Unknown symbol v4l_compat_translate_ioctl
[441559.509189] uvcvideo: disagrees about version of symbol video_devdata
[441559.509192] uvcvideo: Unknown symbol video_devdata
[441559.510182] uvcvideo: disagrees about version of symbol video_unregister_device
[441559.510186] uvcvideo: Unknown symbol video_unregister_device
[441559.510516] uvcvideo: disagrees about version of symbol video_device_alloc
[441559.510519] uvcvideo: Unknown symbol video_device_alloc
[441559.510744] uvcvideo: disagrees about version of symbol video_register_device
[441559.510747] uvcvideo: Unknown symbol video_register_device
[441559.511368] uvcvideo: disagrees about version of symbol video_usercopy
[441559.511371] uvcvideo: Unknown symbol video_usercopy
[441559.511468] uvcvideo: disagrees about version of symbol video_device_release
[441559.511471] uvcvideo: Unknown symbol video_device_release