[cpia] making the Intel QX3 work

[George Almasi]

			Hi everyone,

The Intel QX3 is a toy microscope with a CPIA chip inside. It hooks up
to the USB port. I bought the thing, hooked it up and discovered that
it needed win98 (which I don't have and don't want to buy).

In the linux community, noone else seems to have bothered with this
microscope. But I discovered the linux/cpia home page, backpatched my
kernel, downloaded the cpia driver, and tweaked it (the product id
returned by the webcam is not 0x553, but 0x810 ... "Mattel Inc"). It
works.

*BUT*: The microscope has two lights and a pushbutton hooked up.
AFAIK there is no extra circuitry in the microscope, so the lights and
the button have to be hooked up to the CPIA chip somehow. The button
is unimportant, but the lights are crucial, because you can't take
good pictures by shining a flashlight on the microscope :-) The lights
must be low-power, because the microscope is powered through the USB
connector and it says it won't gobble up more than 500mA, of which 400
are already spoken for, right?

I tried playing with the MCPorts, but although they do return some
funny values (178, 192, 0, 0) writing them doesn't seem to be doing
much except occasionally crash the driver. (the write command fails
with a timeout, and I don't know what that means). The lights
definitely don't turn on.

My question is: does anyone have an idea where the lights might be
hooked up, and how to command them?

Another ignorant basic question: is the program in the CPIA's 8052
changeable? is it possibly customized for the microscope? would it be
possible to download and disassemble it without accessing the RS232
port? the reason I'm asking these questions is because the
documentation is kinda ambiguous on these points. My thought here is
that maybe there is a subroutine in the 8052 that has to be called to
turn the dang lights on.

George

PS No, I haven't opened up the microscope. I'll do that only if I have
no choice - then I'll see where the lights are wired.