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Linux Software

Linux Software for Digital Cameras? 41

Posted by Cliff from the say-"cheese"! dept.
Elbie asks: "I just received a digital camera as a gift, but the only software that comes with it is for these two OSes which look pretty alien to me. How can I get those pictures out of my camera (Canon PowerShot A5) from my Linux box ? Is there any Linux software out there, and if not how to figure out what protocol is used (it uses a standard serial cable to communicate with the PC)"
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Linux Software for Digital Cameras? More

Linux Software for Digital Cameras?

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  • Try JCam - its a Java solution for several
    digital cameras. Go to http://www.jcam.com/
  • Posted by raquels:

    Well, assuming you could not get the software development kit from the vender, then analyzing the I/O would be the next thing to do. As a professional programmer, I would set up a monitoring computer, a Sun SS2 in my case, to monitor both sides of the serial communications.
    This would require 2 serial ports on the monitoring computer, (my SS2 has such), break out cable, and a sample computer, Mac or Clone.
    In my case I'd have to use 19,200 bps since an SS2 using both ports for input does not have the horse power for higher rates :-(.
    As time permits, I will look into writing a driver for Unix, (Solaris 7 in my case), that works with
    an Epson 750z digital camera.
  • Is somebody using a framegrabber under linux? (and maybe on alphas too?)
    Any suggestion as what to buy and not to buy?

    It's for fringe pattern analysis, so the quickcam won't do, I've already tried that ;-)

    The requirements would be... black and white capture (512x512x8bpp), and be well supported under linux.

    Cheers,
    Egor

    ---

  • gphoto [gphoto.org] has drivers for a number of digital cameras, although apparently not yours.

    Ask them, and they may help to find out if your camera is compatible with anything else, or they may give you a hand to reverse engineer the protocol used...

  • You'd probably be OK with an el-cheapo WinTV clone assuming you had an OK camera to attach to it. Any card based on a bt848 and most with a bt878 chip should work fine.

    Video4Linux in the 2.2 kernels is pretty nice, and there are a fair number of applications. Writing a command-line grabber is child's play, too.

    Alan Cox has a reasonable page o' links [linux.org].

  • I have a panasonic NV-DS77EN, you can buy DOS s/ware to make it do things. I haven't been able to find a Linux equivalent.

    I mailed panasonic, but they didn't bother to reply.

    Anybody got any clues ?
  • I have a card with the bt848 chip on it and it does good for grabbing a frame or video up to 30fps. The bttv video4linux driver that are included with the kernels worked great when compiled and loaded as modules.

    The three applications that I use most often that came with xawtv [in-berlin.de] and work great. I run streamer from a cron job to capture an image every minute for the webcam on my homepage [attaway.org]. xawtv runs under X, fbtv runs under SVGA through the kernel frame buffer, and both can run overlay, grab while displaying, or snapping images while you watch. The documentation with the source tarball is excellent.

    Full motion high quality video at 30fps for 14 seconds yeilded me a whopping 46MB avi! streamer will also let you grab at a framerate of your choice if you wish to make interesting time elapsed movies, such as watching grass grow...

    I did have some strange problems with my bt848 card at first, but they were traced to the card not being seated in the socket correctly. I would soon find out my bt848 works like a champ. :)

    If anyone needs help I would be glad to help as I greatly enjoy this card. I got mine as a refurbished Panasonic color egg cam package for $75 (US). It has the usual video-in RCA type connector. For good reading about video in Linux, there is the video4linux mailing list [mailto].

  • Like the guy said, Bt848 works great.

    ATI tuner cards are in the process of being reverse-engineered. Project homepage is here [veiled.net].

  • Yeah, I think software to read one of those adaptors that looks like a floppy but isn't would be pretty nifty too. It'd sure save me some money, since as one who hates cables, I'm looking pretty much only at Sony's Mavica models. Come to think of it, are those adaptors read-only? You could get a 16Mb card, stick it in the adaptor, stick it in the Mavica... oh, no, nevermind. :)
  • http://www.average.org/digicam/ [average.org] is a great resource.

    remember to be gentle with your cameras, I wasn't gentle enough ); -- Ex-digicam user

  • I have an ATI all-in wonder with a simple camera attached to it. Is there any way for me to grab frames from it? Grabbing video would be even better, but it seems that it would be pretty easy to grab frames.
    ------------------------------
  • I'm sorry that this does not apply directly to your situation, as you already have a camera, but for anyone considering buying a camera, I'd suggest the Toshiba PDR-5. It's has a variety of useful features, like a reflective LCD that you can see in sunlight, but the neatest thing is that the back hinges open to reveal a PCMCIA connector. Slap the thing into you PC Card slot you can read the images as regular JPEGS. If you are desktop bound PCMCIA card readers are available for desktops (but buy a laptop anyway, they are fun!)
    More details on the camera are available from Toshiba's web site. Prices for it vary wildly, so hit a price-list site before you buy. I found that shopper.com was the best for cameras.
  • Go see http://www.jcam.com/
    A Linux version exists, and they say the A5 support is due Real Soon Now. Prod them - it may be ready!
  • I just checked a retailer, and saw that your camera uses CompactFLASH cards. This means you can easily download pictures if you have a PCMCIA slot and and adapter card. That's what I use.

    I have a cheep laptop (running Linux) that I have a network card for. I have the PCMCIA scripts setup so when I insert the card it automatcally mounts the msdos filesystem on it. I then use FTP to transfer the images to my main computer. Another option is to buy a PCMCIA card controler for your computer, though that may be more than a used laptop. If you buy a PCMCIA card controler, buy one that hooks up to the ISA or PCI bus, not the parallel port or SCSI buss. The latter two are not supported by Linux.

  • what about something to read from a flashpath floppy adapter that uses smartmedia cards? any protocol specs available if not?
  • I got the new photopc v 2.9 from http://www.average.org/digicam It works great with my Agfa Ephoto 307 that I use for a field camera. It has about 20 commands and some good options for retriving, erasing, etc. All in all it works great.


  • i'm not sure if there's software out there, but you can try this:

    write the manufacturer and ask for protocol details, then contact the gPhoto developers
    (here [gphoto.org]) with the details. we'll build the library for you, and include it in the current CVS.

    on the average, manufacturers are not-so-happy to provide protocol details (propriety stuff), so don't get your hopes up there, BUT (big BUT), if that route's a no-go, then contact the gPhoto developers anyways, and they'll help "get" the protocol with you.

    of course, if there is software out there, then everything i said is for nothing... :)
  • .. and what about those new series of Kodak, dc265
    and so on!

    PCMCIA is waaaaaay faster, good choice btw.

    -vh
  • Hmm.. strange. Have you checked your port's
    settings? No irq/address conflicts? And the speed
    of the serial port is set to the maximum 115200?
    (setserial /dev/ttySX spd_vhi), and you do have
    a 16550 UART?

    Btw, there is a short delay after dumping
    the connection and starting a new one.. (the delay is natural).. also 0.0.1 didn't have
    error checking on the state of the camera (camera could be still finishing its last command serie, but "ks" ends normally)

    Hmm, it works just fine for with 115200 speed me on FreeBSD, and on Linux.



    -vh


  • I use Linux to get the images off the flashcard for my digital camera. I found a company that manufactured a "PCMCIA" slot device for PCs. It looks like a floppy drive bay. The media for my camera (a Kodak DC-210) come with an adaptor to make it PCMCIA compatible. After recompiling Linux 2.0.36 for PCMCIA support, I could access the flash card like a disk drive. I wrote a little script to coordinate copying these files and deleting the PCMCIA card. Send me some email if you want the code and more details.
  • There's a Data Translations DT3155 linux driver floating around the net somewhere, but it's only for 2.0 kernels. I'm using it now and it works pretty well. The card, which does 640x480x8bpp, is ~$700. There are several other companies which claim linux support, though, and Data Translations is going Windows-only, so you might want to avoid them. MuTech is one company which supports linux, I believe..
  • I recently used a digital camera that would write jpeg (and a digital-camera specific format) files to a DOS floppy disk. That makes it pretty portable.. practically any computer with a floppy drive can read DOS disks. If you go for a solution like this, don't forget to take a look at mtools.
  • I have a Ricoh RDC-300Z, which comes with some software called "Photo Studio Lite", and it will open in Wine, but did not seem to funcion properly. This may have to do with com ports, because the error message that it kept giving me was one that I received when I first set it up in NT. I also tried to get AutoCAD R14 to funcion in Wine, and had no luck, so I had written off both of these programs in Wine. If others have had better luck, I am interested in hearing about it.

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