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A Linux UVC camera plugin driver for the Player/Stage robot server

Our rescue robots have OQO 01+ PCs as their main computers and run the Player 1.6.5 robot server from the Player/Stage project. However, these only have one USB2.0 port (plus a firewire port) and Linux does some somewhat strange things when some USB1.1 devices are plugged into USB2.0 hubs (we need USB2.0 for our network adapter).

To solve this we got hold of some Logitech QuickCam Pro 5000 cameras, which are USB2.0 compatible. Unfortunately, they also don't have V4L drivers (they use the Linux UVC driver available from http://linux-uvc.berlios.de/ and don't have a PWC chip). This means that the camerav4l driver in Player/Stage won't work with this camera.

Here's a Player/Stage plugin driver (that is, the bit of code that runs in Player/Stage, not the camera's Linux driver itself) that I wrote to enable this camera to be used in Player/Stage. It is very alpha and currently I've only tested it with Player/Stage 1.6.5 running on Fedora Core 4 with a Logitech QuickCam Pro 5000 ... but I'd be very interested to see who else has this working with their setups!

This code is released under the GNU GPL which is included, so bear in mind that this software is provided in the hope that it will be useful but with no guarantee that it's good for anything! :-)

To use this driver you will also need:
  • Player version 1.6.5 with plugin driver support. This means NOT Cygwin (unless someone has managed to get plugins working!). It'll probably work with any 1.6.x (and maybe 1.5.x) version of Player but probably not Player 2.x.
  • A camera that is supported by the Linux UVC driver. At the time of writing this list includes the following cameras (taken from linux-uvc.berlios.de):
    • Logitech QuickCam Fusion
    • Logitech QuickCam Orbit
    • Logitech QuickCam Pro for Notebooks
    • Logitech QuickCam Pro 5000
  • The Linux UVC driver from linux-uvc.berlios.de, I've tested with revision 24 from their Subversion repository. Note that you'll need a very recent kernel (like 2.6.15) to get this working.

If you download and use this, please let me know how you go, especially if you're using a camera other than the QuickCam Pro 5000. Enjoy!

Download:
Version 0.1a (first release)
Please do NOT directly link to this file, its location may change without notice!
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