From john@jcoppens.com  Sun Aug 31 05:23:49 2003
From: john@jcoppens.com (John Coppens)
Date: Sun, 31 Aug 2003 01:23:49 -0300
Subject: [cpia] Creative webcam II
Message-ID: <20030831012349.061523a6.john@jcoppens.com>

Hi all.

First thanks for the CPiA driver - it works great. 

I got myself a simple parallel version of this camera, and I plan to use
it on board of a balloon experiment we're doing with my students at the
university. First I wanted to test it on my Linux machine, and got it
working in no time with the CPiA driver. A few problems:

1) I have the impression that when I used 'webcam' (the program that comes
with xawtv) the camera remains in video mode, causing a few problems:

   - The images are sent in update mode - only the differences are sent,
and parts of the image that don't change are not updated. This get
particularly bad if some part of the image is damaged for some reason
(This happens frequently switching from xawtv to webcam).

   - The AGC and other controls do not work that well - it takes several
pictures to 'stabilize'. Probably same cause. Is there some way around
this?

2) After a few hours, something went wrong and the camera blacked out.
Everything was working, just no image. I slowly tried to modify all
parameters with cpia-control, and when I disabled/enabled the banding
filter, the image reappeared.

3) The controller is a VV0760P002, anyone knows what the difference is
with the P001 of the datasheet available?

Thanks in advance!

John

From john@jcoppens.com  Sun Aug 31 16:32:25 2003
From: john@jcoppens.com (John Coppens)
Date: Sun, 31 Aug 2003 12:32:25 -0300
Subject: [cpia] Creative webcam II
In-Reply-To: <20030831012349.061523a6.john@jcoppens.com>
References: <20030831012349.061523a6.john@jcoppens.com>
Message-ID: <20030831123225.0de9d44b.john@jcoppens.com>

On Sun, 31 Aug 2003 01:23:49 -0300
John Coppens <john@jcoppens.com> wrote:

> Hi all.
> 
> First thanks for the CPiA driver - it works great. 
> 
> I got myself a simple parallel version of this camera, and I plan to use
> it on board of a balloon experiment we're doing with my students at the
> university. First I wanted to test it on my Linux machine, and got it
> working in no time with the CPiA driver. A few problems:
> 
> 1) I have the impression that when I used 'webcam' (the program that
> comes with xawtv) the camera remains in video mode, causing a few
> problems:
> 
>    - The images are sent in update mode - only the differences are sent,
> and parts of the image that don't change are not updated. This get
> particularly bad if some part of the image is damaged for some reason
> (This happens frequently switching from xawtv to webcam).
> 
>    - The AGC and other controls do not work that well - it takes several
> pictures to 'stabilize'. Probably same cause. Is there some way around
> this?

Point 1) solved: Disabled compression with cpia-control. I was convinced
that compression referred to some kind of jpeg compression, but reading
the datasheet, found that is was this which caused the problems.

> 2) After a few hours, something went wrong and the camera blacked out.
> Everything was working, just no image. I slowly tried to modify all
> parameters with cpia-control, and when I disabled/enabled the banding
> filter, the image reappeared.
> 
> 3) The controller is a VV0760P002, anyone knows what the difference is
> with the P001 of the datasheet available?
> 
> Thanks in advance!
> 
> John
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