Sipix Blink Digital Camera
Craig
linux. But frankly, I think there isn't a driver for it :\
As you can see in the subject body, it is those tiny cameras (definitely
something to show off on a night out ;).
I would have thought it would access the memory on the camera as a usb
storage device?
--
(o_ .----------------------------------------.
//\ | Craig Butcher | http://www.wizball.co.uk|
V_/_ | - Using Debian GNU/Linux - |
`----------------------------------------'
Bruce Stephens
> Okay, this is probably some last attempts to get this camera to work in
> linux. But frankly, I think there isn't a driver for it :\
>
> As you can see in the subject body, it is those tiny cameras (definitely
> something to show off on a night out ;).
>
> I would have thought it would access the memory on the camera as a usb
> storage device?
Some do, and some don't. Presumably the Blink camera is one of those
that doesn't.
jphoto and gphoto2 are two applications that people use to read
pictures off cameras; it's possible that one or other will work, even
though they don't say so (I'm tempted by this camera, too, so I
checked yesterday). Apparently many USB cameras use the same
chipsets, so although the specific camera might not be mentioned, it
might work anyway.
Craig
> Okay, this is probably some last attempts to get this camera to work in
> linux. But frankly, I think there isn't a driver for it :\
>
> As you can see in the subject body, it is those tiny cameras (definitely
> something to show off on a night out ;).
>
> I would have thought it would access the memory on the camera as a usb
> storage device?
I gave up with linux and installed it via vmware. Way easier ;)
John Ineson
> Okay, this is probably some last attempts to get this camera to work in
> linux. But frankly, I think there isn't a driver for it :\
>
> As you can see in the subject body, it is those tiny cameras (definitely
> something to show off on a night out ;).
Yep, I just ordered one the other day. (N.B. Unfortunately, if it's like
the l'Espion, you can only show it off on a night out -- a friend has
one and unless you find somewhere well lit, you won't actually get any
decent pictures out of it.)
> I would have thought it would access the memory on the camera as a usb
> storage device?
Apparently not. Googling for 'sipix blink linux' is absolutely hopeless.
Usually you'd at least find a few poor souls on the newsgroups asking
about support, but this far it seems to be just thee & me :(
Oh well, I have time on my hands -- anybody suggest how you start
writing software to support a device like this? :)
(Installing the Windows software in VMWare and sniffing sounds like a
good start, but I don't even know how you'd do that...)
--
John Ineson ``A flyback transformer in the monitor generates a few kV
that is used to accelerate electrons in the CRT to hit the screen,
and produce the pornographic images we all love to view because
no girl will talk to us.'' -- www.afrotechmods.com, ghetto hardware fun
Tim Haynes
> Yep, I just ordered one the other day. (N.B. Unfortunately, if it's like
> the l'Espion, you can only show it off on a night out -- a friend has one
> and unless you find somewhere well lit, you won't actually get any decent
> pictures out of it.)
I find that the l'Epsion is *very* sensitive to lighting all-round - its
idea of `dark' is a far cry away from my optics', and it actually has some
concept of `too bright', e.g. a day at the beach[0] or pointing at a
regular 60W bulb on the ceiling or something.
[0] It refused to take the same shot as
<http://stirfried.vegetable.org.uk/personal/Pictures/beach/half_dsc00096.jpg>,
for example.
I wouldn't mind getting the photos off it onto a linux box of some sort,
though... has anyone managed that much yet?
~Tim
--
15:53:48 up 219 days, 16:23, 7 users, load average: 0.81, 0.48, 0.33
pig...@stirfried.vegetable.org.uk |A big sky above me,
http://piglet.is.dreaming.org |West winds blow.
Laz
> Oh well, I have time on my hands -- anybody suggest how you start
> writing software to support a device like this? :)
>
> (Installing the Windows software in VMWare and sniffing sounds like a
> good start, but I don't even know how you'd do that...)
Are there any good tutorials on doing this sort of thing? I've got an
unsupported USB scanner that I wouldn't mind a driver for, and I wouldn't
mind a 'play' in this area!
USB sniffing sounds good but how does one go about doing that?!!
Cheers,
Laz
Bruce Stephens
[...]
> I find that the l'Epsion is *very* sensitive to lighting all-round - its
> idea of `dark' is a far cry away from my optics', and it actually has some
> concept of `too bright', e.g. a day at the beach[0] or pointing at a
> regular 60W bulb on the ceiling or something.
>
> [0] It refused to take the same shot as
> <http://stirfried.vegetable.org.uk/personal/Pictures/beach/half_dsc00096.jpg>,
> for example.
>
> I wouldn't mind getting the photos off it onto a linux box of some sort,
> though... has anyone managed that much yet?
For the l'Espion, yes, people have:
<http://www.users.dircon.co.uk/~crypto/ddc-espion/>
[...]
Tim Haynes
> > I wouldn't mind getting the photos off it onto a linux box of some sort,
> > though... has anyone managed that much yet?
>
> For the l'Espion, yes, people have:
>
> <http://www.users.dircon.co.uk/~crypto/ddc-espion/>
Wahey, thanks lots - have bookmarked, will investigate after the weekend :)
~Tim
--
Too fast to live, |pig...@stirfried.vegetable.org.uk
too young to die |http://spodzone.org.uk/
bye bye. |
John Ineson
> John Ineson wrote:
>> Oh well, I have time on my hands -- anybody suggest how you start
>> writing software to support a device like this? :)
> Are there any good tutorials on doing this sort of thing? I've got an
> unsupported USB scanner that I wouldn't mind a driver for, and I wouldn't
> mind a 'play' in this area!
Exactly. I've also got an MP3 player that I'd like to transfer files to
from Linux boxen. I've got (at least half) a brain, and time on my
hands, but little idea where to start.
On a related note, I'm slightly surprised about the way Linux USB
support seems to work -- eg having things like the Diamond Rio supported
in the kernel. Surely that sort of thing should be in userspace?
Jonathan Buzzard
The best way to reverse engineer a USB device is to use a free program
call USB snoop. Basically this inserts itself between the device driver
for the bit of hardware you want to reverse engineer, and the USB card
hardware drivers under Windows. It then promptly logs the traffic
to a file on your hard disk for inspection. You then prod the device
and observe what it is doing. It can be seen at
http://benoit.papillault.free.fr/usbsnoop/index.en.php3
It has been used to great success in breaking open the many USB
scanners that manufactures refuse to talk about and writting drivers'
for SANE.
The hardest part of any reverse engineering is always seeing what is
going on. The WDM, makes a software solution to this guaranteed for
USB devices. There is also a comercial piece of software called
BusHound that can log IDE,SCSI,USB and FireWire. There is also
a demo version of this that is limited to logging to memory. Though
you can then save to disk. This can be seen here
http://www.perisoft.net/bushound/index.htm
The reason why parallel port devices have always been so hard to
reverse engineer is that there is no easy way to log what is going on.
There is also a bit of a tutorial on usb snoop here
http://www.toth.demon.co.uk/usb/reverse-0.2.txt
JAB.
--
Jonathan A. Buzzard Email: jona...@buzzard.org.uk
Northumberland, United Kingdom. Tel: +44(0)1661-832195
Ian Pointer
> Okay, this is probably some last attempts to get this camera to work in
> linux. But frankly, I think there isn't a driver for it :\
>
> As you can see in the subject body, it is those tiny cameras (definitely
> something to show off on a night out ;).
>
> I would have thought it would access the memory on the camera as a usb
> storage device?
Unfortunately, it doesn't 8-(. I got one of these a couple of weeks ago,
after assuming that it would work with gphoto (there was a false addition
to the gphoto2 supported cameras list which seemed to indicate that the
Sipix Stylecam was supported, so I thought that it would work).
After discovering that it didn't, I've tried to reverse-engineer the
Windows driver, with a little success. I can make the camera take
pictures, find out how many pictures are stored on the camera, delete
pictures, and even transfer picture data. However, I have absolute;y no
idea about the format of this data, so at the moment the pictures just
sit on my computer being useless 8-). I'm going to be sending SiPix an
e-mail in the next few days, to see if I can glean some information from
them, and failing that, I'm going to turn my results over to the gphoto
team, to see if they can work out the format based on sample pictures...
--
Ian Pointer
Jonathan Buzzard
I would lay bets that the data is in a jpeg format of some description.
It may well be missing header information or have a proprietary
header because they are a set of standard parameters for each image
like the width and height.
Ian Pointer
>
> I would lay bets that the data is in a jpeg format of some description.
> It may well be missing header information or have a proprietary header
> because they are a set of standard parameters for each image like the
> width and height.
>
> JAB.
There's got to be some compression going on - the small pictures (320x240)
are about 20k in size, and the 640x480 pictures are only 80k in size. I
can assure you that naively adding the jpeg header doesn't work 8-). I'm
still new to this...
--
Ian Pointer
Jonathan Buzzard
I imagine that it is a bit more complex than taking the binary download
and stuffing a jpeg header on it. Even then a jpeg header is quite
complex and full of tags conataining information about the image and
pointers to other places in the file. I suspect that what you get
from the camera is just the raw compressed pixel data, with maybe
some other proprietary stuff to say whether it is 320x240 or 640x480 etc.
What I would do is save a picture under the windows software and
then download the same picture data using your reverse engineered
Linux stuff, and compare the two in a hex editor. Does the download
appear anywhere in the jpeg image allowing for the fact that there
might be some extra stuff at the start/end of the download?
I imagine you will also need a copy of the JPEG file specification
close at hand to make sense of it all and work out how to correctly
add a JPEG header.
Iain.
> There's got to be some compression going on - the small pictures (320x240)
> are about 20k in size, and the 640x480 pictures are only 80k in size. I
> can assure you that naively adding the jpeg header doesn't work 8-). I'm
> still new to this...
Have you tried the file command? Type
file <filename>
and see if it has an idea.
Iain.
--
Iain Georgeson | Liverpool | Keirsey: INTJ | Debian Potato
> If the status of a [SNMP] table and it's columns is marked as
> OBSOLETE, what should the behaviour of the agent be??
The agent should complain bitterly about how things were better in the
good old days. -- Les Cargill, comp.protocols.snmp
Tim Haynes
> Ian Pointer <ian.p...@btinternet.com> writes:
> > There's got to be some compression going on - the small pictures
> > (320x240) are about 20k in size, and the 640x480 pictures are only 80k
> > in size. I can assure you that naively adding the jpeg header doesn't
> > work 8-). I'm still new to this...
>
> Have you tried the file command? Type
>
> file <filename>
>
> and see if it has an idea.
ISTR (fairly vaguely) a friend of mine talking about PICT format in
connection with these toys - you might want to investigate this as well.
~Tim
--
A big sky above me, |pig...@stirfried.vegetable.org.uk
West winds blow. |http://spodzone.org.uk/
Nix
> iain-new...@kremlinux.demon.co.uk (Iain.) writes:
>
>> Ian Pointer <ian.p...@btinternet.com> writes:
>> > There's got to be some compression going on - the small pictures
>> > (320x240) are about 20k in size, and the 640x480 pictures are only 80k
>> > in size. I can assure you that naively adding the jpeg header doesn't
>> > work 8-). I'm still new to this...
>>
>> Have you tried the file command? Type
>>
>> file <filename>
>>
>> and see if it has an idea.
>
> ISTR (fairly vaguely) a friend of mine talking about PICT format in
> connection with these toys - you might want to investigate this as well.
ImageMagick can handle PICT if compiled correctly: try asking
identify(1) what the image is.
--
`What happened?'
`Nick shipped buggy code!'
`Oh, no dinner for him...'
Ian Pointer
> Ian Pointer <ian.p...@btinternet.com> writes:
>> There's got to be some compression going on - the small pictures
>> (320x240) are about 20k in size, and the 640x480 pictures are only 80k
>> in size. I can assure you that naively adding the jpeg header doesn't
>> work 8-). I'm still new to this...
>
> Have you tried the file command? Type
>
> file <filename>
>
> and see if it has an idea.
That was the first thing I did 8-). Nothing quite so easy, I'm afraid...
--
Ian Pointer
Steve Lunson
Hi all,
I've noticed in /proc/bus/usb/drivers that the vendor of the camera
(0851) is (according to http://www.linux-usb.org/) Macronix
International Ltd (website: http://www.macronix.com/). I've tried
digging further as to a camera that also uses the same chip, but my
search hasn't come to any conclusions. I post this info in the hope
it will be of use to someone here.
Is there anywhere I can get a copy of the reverse engineered driver (
or even better, a copy of the driver with instructions on how it was
reverse engineered so I can learn :-) ) as I now have quite a few
images I would like to download so I can stop constantly buying
replacement batteries!
Many thanks in advance.
Steve.
Ian Pointer
> Hi all,
>
> I've noticed in /proc/bus/usb/drivers that the vendor of the camera
> (0851) is (according to http://www.linux-usb.org/) Macronix
> International Ltd (website: http://www.macronix.com/). I've tried
> digging further as to a camera that also uses the same chip, but my
> search hasn't come to any conclusions. I post this info in the hope it
> will be of use to someone here.
>
>
I'd managed to get the Macronix name from the .inf file supplied with the
camera, but as you say, there doesn't seem to be any other cameras that
use the same chip, and a quick Google search doesn't come up with
anything. I've sent them an e-mail asking for further information, so
we'll see what that they say.
> Is there anywhere I can get a copy of the reverse engineered driver ( or
> even better, a copy of the driver with instructions on how it was
> reverse engineered so I can learn :-) ) as I now have quite a few images
> I would like to download so I can stop constantly buying replacement
> batteries!
>
>
As far as I know, such a driver isn't available yet. I've cobbled together
something that'll transfer data from the camera, but at the moment
(without knowing the data format), it's fairly useless 8-(.
> Many thanks in advance.
>
> Steve.
--
Ian Pointer
Craig
> I've noticed in /proc/bus/usb/drivers that the vendor of the camera
> (0851) is (according to http://www.linux-usb.org/) Macronix
> International Ltd (website: http://www.macronix.com/). I've tried
> digging further as to a camera that also uses the same chip, but my
> search hasn't come to any conclusions. I post this info in the hope
> it will be of use to someone here.
Did all that since I had the camera first time. I gave up and installed it
via vmware. Useful anyway.
> Is there anywhere I can get a copy of the reverse engineered driver (
> or even better, a copy of the driver with instructions on how it was
> reverse engineered so I can learn :-) ) as I now have quite a few
> images I would like to download so I can stop constantly buying
> replacement batteries!
If you really want to write a driver.. something like USB snoopy or
something will pick something up from the USB connection etc (windows
only).