[cpia] STV0680 co-processor

[Adam Harrison]

Hello All,

I have recently purchased a cheap (35 ukp exclusive of VAT) digital camera
from scan (http://www.scan.co.uk/cameras.htm - Scan e-studio digital camera)
with the following features:

CIF & QCIF selectable resolution imaging
16Mbit memory (20 CIF/80 QCIF images)
RS232 & USB port
continuous take mode to memory whilst disconnected
streaming capture whilst connected to USB

>From the outside, it looks like a cheap and nasty plastic film camera - it
comes with a dinky little tripod mount for when you want to use it as a
webcam. Cracking the case open reveals an STV0680 surface mount ASIC. A google
search for this chip ID turns up the following:

http://www.st-angliamicro.com/newsarchive/st40.htm

There are no downloadable specs from this site; in fact, that is the only page
which mentions this chip (it's not even in their catalogue). Interestingly
enough, you can connect a VGA res CCD to this chip and up to 64Mbit memory.

In the mean time, whilst poking around in the kernel source I came across the
CPiA driver - and webcam.sourceforge.net. It was then I noticed the link
between STM and VLSI Vision - a similar (earlier ?) chipset, Vision STV0673 is
even mentioned on the page. The USB vendor ID in the CPiA driver is the same
as my camera, but the device ID is different (mine is 0x202 instead of 0x002).
I did try modifying the CPiA driver to recognise 0x202 instead of 0x002 in the
vain hope that they had used the same protocol, but khubd blew up with a NULL
pointer dereference.

It's apparent that Vision (Henry Bruce in particular) has supplied the
community with full specs for their previous chipsets - is there any
established protocol for contacting them, or should I just mail them direct ?
I'm very keen to get this camera working with Linux :-) (especially because
the streaming video support which comes with it is lame - it's just a test app
from the developers kit so you can't save the stream or do anything useful
with it, and it only gets 1-4 fps due to early drivers - the docs indicate it
should do 9fps CIF, 20fps+ QCIF)

Cheers,

Adam.

-- 
Adam Harrison - Senior Analyst - Secure Systems Group, AGSL.