This driver will download pictures from the Concord EyeQ Mini. This camera has Vendor:Product number 0x3e8:0x2182 and is one of several cameras occupying the entry level in the digital camera market, as do the SQ905 cameras. I mention the SQ905 cameras because the Concord EyeQ Easy has been reported to me as an SQ905 camera. So that is how I obtained this creature, by accident. I went to WalMart hoping to find an SQ905 camera which would do 640x480. I found a Concord EyeQ Mini, thought it was probably the same thing as a Concord EyeQ Easy, bought it, brought it home, and found out it was something altogether different. Well, then, I just had to make it work... The chip inside the camera is unknown, but the .inf file provided with the camera calls it an "Aox." Apparently, Aox is the same company as Endpoints, Inc. The chip may be an Endpoints SE401 or SE402. According to its manual, the camera can be used as a webcam, or to shoot a short video sequence. AFAIK both of these features require kernel module support in order to be used properly, and those features are not addressed here. This camera library provides a driver for the Concord EyeQ Mini as a still camera. For those interested in the webcam features, there do exist Linux kernel drivers for webcams with SE401 (module "se401") and SE402 module "epcam"). Those drivers do indeed support cameras with Vendor number 0x3e8, but Product number 0x2182 is not listed in their source files. Furthermore, the mere act of adding the number and re-compiling the kernel module does not seem all by itself to make this camera work as a webcam. The author of these two kernel modules has stated to me in e-mail that Endpoints was willing to share some information with him about how to access the SE401 and SE402 chips in webcam mode. However, my own request for similar information about the still camera functionality has not been answered, as of 11/04/03. This camlib, therefore, has been constructed by means of observation, combined with guesswork. Features and quirks of the camera: The camera has two sizes of pictures. The high-resolution pictures are 640x480 pixels. Their data format is a Bayer array, from which it is possible to create a PPM image. The camera holds a maximum of 23 pictures in high-resolution mode. The manufacturer's driver creates JPEG compressed images from the downloaded data, and the user is certainly free to do same. Here, high-resolution pictures will be saved in PPM format. The low-resolution pictures are 320x240. According to the manual, these pictures are compressed in the camera and are downloaded as JPEG images. However, the compression used is unknown. Thus, it is currently not possible to make pictures from the resulting files. You can just download them. Or, better yet, figure out what the format is and let me know. The low-compression data download is not of fixed size, but may vary from one picture to the next. All low-resolution photos will be saved as RAW files, until such time as they are better understood. If you have a random mixture of low-resolution and high-resolution photos on the camera, then the camera will always download the low-resolution pictures first and the high-resolution photos only after that. In other words, in that situation the pictures will not be downloaded in the order in which you shot them. The camera also supports "video clip" mode, in which the camera keeps taking frames so long as one holds down the shutter button. Unfortunately, there is not much point in implementing that until the low-resolution non-standard encoded format is better understood, because that is what it uses. Some things which work for me, with various gphoto2 options: gphoto2 --summary will report the number of low-resolution pictures and the number of high-resolution pictures separately, as well as the total number of pictures. gphoto2 -P is functional, but see previous remarks about high and low resolution photos. gphoto2 -p x-y is functional, too, assuming there are at least y pictures in the camera and x <= y. gphoto2 --get-all-raw-data License: LGPL (see the head of the libgphoto2 source tree; this camera library is a part of the libgphoto2 project). Warranty: None, neither expressed nor implied. This camera driver has been written for the sake of the challenge, and in order to learn more about both hardware and software support for the hardware from the actual experience of writing a device driver. Those intending to use the Aox camera library should keep these facts in mind, in order to keep an appropriate sense of perspective. Nevertheless, the Aox camera library driver works for me and carries out for me the functions which are described here. I seriously hope and intend that it should work for others, too. Please report any problems or bugs to me or to the gphoto-devel mailing list. Copyright by Theodore Kilgore, November 11, 2003. kilgota at auburn.edu Additional remarks, June 27, 2004: First the good news: Thumbnail capability has been added, and the library should be fully functional now with a GUI frontend. I have tested both gtkam and digikam. Gtkam works very nicely for me, but for unknown reasons my digikam somehow fails to display the thumbnails. That is probably the fault of my digikam setup, because it fails for all of my cameras. It may work for you and if you want to use digikam then certainly you should try it. The bad news: The camera has "video clip" capability, meaning that with a certain camera setting it is possible to hold down the shutter button and keep shooting frames (the only limitation being the amount of free memory in the camera). Unfortunately, the clip mode uses the non-standard compression, and thus there is no point in trying to implement clip mode until the compression is understood. June 17, 2006: New camera D-MAX DM3588 - 0x03e8:0x2130 found by Amauri Magagna <amaurimagagna@gmail.com>. The new camera seems to differ only in minor details from the previously known cameras, but requires a separate model entry.
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