(forw) (forw) Re: Agfa CL20

I'm just forwarding this here for archival ;-)

Peter

-- 
Thought is limitation. Free your mind.

attached mail follows:

Hier eine von 2 Mails gestern...

----- Forwarded message from Dennis <dennis.noordsij_at_wiral.com> -----

From: Dennis <dennis.noordsij_at_wiral.com>
To: philipp_at_poeml.de
Subject: Re: Agfa CL20
Date: Sun, 1 Sep 2002 03:01:13 +0300

Hi Phil!

> Yes, I'm working on this driver! And I really want to finish this work!
> My brother, who works for SuSE linux, now also wants to help me. It's
> actually quite fun to do this together with some people.
>
> One problem is, that I just started to write a big project at
> university. So I can't spent whole days anymore just studying this
> camrea.
>
> What I did so far is getting traces and analysing them. SO I was able to
> download a thumbnail "by hand". Next step I will to is to write a little
> program that will just download all pictures and dump them into files.
> Then, I will figure out all the other functions, like deleting and
> downloading single pictures and stuff.

That is pretty good progress!


> > I would like to ask you what your progress is right now, and if you would
> > share some knowledge and code, and I would like to help you with getting
> > this camera supported in gphoto.
>
> If this is all working, I would like to write a lib for gphoto, so it is
> possible for everyone to plug this thing in and just use it as normal.
>
> My main problem actually is, that I'm not a C programmer. So what I'm
> doing right now, beside writing my project, is learning C! :))
> After I learned C good enough I will start looking at the gphoto sources
> and the usb-robot sources to develop some code.
> I think I understood the protocol so far, that it would be possible to
> implement first functions of the camera in a little program.
>
> Well, if you want to help me with this (which is really kind of you!)
> you could write some code.

Yes, I'd love too! Please tell me what you have discovered about the protocol 
:-)

> I can maybe provide you with the protocol details I have found out.
> It's by far not all of the protocol features, but maybe we could put
> together something.
> If we have a little tool, which can talk to the camera, it will be
> probably easy to find out the rest, by just trying out several
> combinations of the usb setup packages.


I would really like to get this baby working. C programming is no problem, and 
I am already kind of looking forward to perfect KDE integration, the Windows 
version (stripped down explorer window with thumbnails) is hideous :-)


> Do you know how all the libs (gphoto, usb) work? I haven't looked at
> them yet.

I have not made a gphoto driver yet, but their API is very clean and 
well-designed, with all the hard work already done, all you do is plug in the 
right USB codes (basically :-)


> > I can't wait to just plug it in and see the thumbnails in konqueror on a
> > KDE 3.1 desktop running on Gentoo Linux :-)
>
> Yes, me too! :-))
> I already have the next project in mind: Getting webcam and video
> capturing to work! Can't be so difficult. Actually it looks like you
> send some code to the camera and then it starts sending on and on until
> you tell it to stop.

Whooha! Getting the cam to work as video4linux was also a goal of me, but the 
USB tracer wouldn't even show a trace when using the camera in webcam mode, 
so I didn't persue that too far. It's pretty much what you describe though, 
sending some setup and options, and just receive the data.

Looking forward to hearing from you, and to getting this all to work!!

Thanks for starting this project!
Regards,
Dennis


> Thanks for you mail!
>
> Philipp





----- End forwarded message -----

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