UVC Camera Control, now for Mac and Linux!

[Moritz Kassner]

Dear PUPIL users,

I've been working on this for the last days and want to share:

None of the uvc-camera controls are not exposed to the user in OpenCV. This is sad, because there is so much cool stuff your Eye and World Camera can do!

For Linux, a shell tool exists that lets you set all these parameters. So if wrote a python wrapper (using subprocess) to have all these controls available in the PUPIL capture software. (see last post)

For Mac, the situation was really very dire! Apple does not care to expose any UVC controls to the user. The very awesome sluggo (http://www.dm9.se/) has made a c library that is inspired by Dominic Szablewski's uvc camera control. All I had to do was write a python wrapper using c_types and now we have these settings exposed to PUPIL on the mac side too! I added the compiled binary to the pupil project - no additional dependency to take care of - Yeay!

For Mac and Linux, exposure and focus can now be set manually!

Please note, that not all settings are (yet) available on mac. On Linux you can do some cool stuff though: 

 - Zoom to do windowed capture

 - Pan and Tilt to move the recording window on the cameras image sensor.

Also, cameras are now detected by their names. No need for find-cameras.py anymore! I now this works reliably on Linux, for Mac there are still some guesses involved. 

Please, check it all out in the "dev" branch, try things out and let me know of bugs!!

m