digital camera - Longshot!
 

Dear All,
I've just taken delivery of a shiny new microscope with a digital imaging
system. Essentially a fancy usb webcam. As usual out of the box there is no
Linux support. The model is a Q Imaging Go-3. Their website doesn't mention
linux support except in the context of the firewire models.
I've done a lsusb and got the following info:
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 5354:80e3 [no model or manufacturer info]

I've looked through various webcam, gentoo-wiki, and V4L sites to see if those
IDs mean anything, but no luck sofar. I even tried googling them. Truth is
I'm not sure what they actually refer to.

Longshot, has anybody got this camera and got it working.
The alternative I suppose is to run it through XP which I'm going to install
in a virtual machine later. I've got other software I need to use which I
can't persuade Wine to run.
--
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Dr. Matthew R. Lee
Instituto Biologia Marina 'Jurgen Winter'
Universidad Austral de Chile
Campus Isla Teja
Valdivia

matt@matthewlee.org

URL: meiochile.matthewlee.org
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digital camera - Longshot!
 

On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 01:50:42PM -0400, Matthew R. Lee wrote:
> Dear All,
> I've just taken delivery of a shiny new microscope with a digital imaging
> system. Essentially a fancy usb webcam. As usual out of the box there is no
> Linux support. The model is a Q Imaging Go-3. Their website doesn't mention
> linux support except in the context of the firewire models.
> I've done a lsusb and got the following info:
> Bus 001 Device 003: ID 5354:80e3 [no model or manufacturer info]

What happens when you plug it in? I had some USB devices which didn't
claim to have Linux support yet worked fine as simple file systems. I
suppose the microscope might have fancy controls which work via the
USB interface, but if the only USB purpose is to read files, it might
be good enough.

Sounds like a pretty neat toy tho, and best of all, it sounds like it
might be actual work-related for you. Good luck.

--
... _._. ._ ._. . _._. ._. ___ .__ ._. . .__. ._ .. ._.
Felix Finch: scarecrow repairman & rocket surgeon / felix@crowfix.com
GPG = E987 4493 C860 246C 3B1E 6477 7838 76E9 182E 8151 ITAR license #4933
I've found a solution to Fermat's Last Theorem but I see I've run out of room o
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digital camera - Longshot!
 

On 18 Jun 2008, at 18:50, Matthew R. Lee wrote:

...
I've done a lsusb and got the following info:
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 5354:80e3 [no model or manufacturer info]

I've looked through various webcam, gentoo-wiki, and V4L sites to
see if those
IDs mean anything, but no luck sofar. I even tried googling them.
Truth is

I'm not sure what they actually refer to.


I'm more familiar with PCI IDs <http://www.pcidatabase.com/> but
presumably USB IDs work the same.


The one part of the ID belongs to the manufacturer, the other relates
to the specific device - eg you can see from the list at <http://
www.linux-usb.org/usb.ids> that 03f0:0004 would be a Hewlett-Packard
DeskJet 895c.


Normally when you run `lspci` (and I would imagine `lsusb`) the
manufacturer & model are looked up and, instead of the numbers, are
shown by name. In your case no-one has submitted your numbers to the
database or names to match them.


AIUI the IDs are picked fairly arbitrarily, so two devices with the
same chipset may have completely different numbers. Often (always?)
the author of a driver will include a list of supported devices in
the driver's header files, and the driver will check to see if any
supported devices are present before trying to do any magic.


Thus it may be that - in fact, I'd imagine it's likely that - your
device uses the same chipset as (say) a Logitech webcam or an Apple
iSight, but the module isn't autoloaded because the driver doesn't
know about it. If you are able to determine the chipset - a Google
provides little information, so the obvious way is to open the case
with a screwdriver & inspect the identifiers printed on the largest
chip on the board - it should be pretty easy to add your device (see,
for example, where 3890 is mentioned in line 115 of /usr/src/linux/
drivers/net/wireless/prism54/prism54.mod.c and <http://
www.pcidatabase.com/vendor_details.php?id=1132>)


Stroller.

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digital camera - Longshot!
 

On Wed, 2008-06-18 at 13:50 -0400, Matthew R. Lee wrote:
> Dear All,
> I've just taken delivery of a shiny new microscope with a digital imaging
> system. Essentially a fancy usb webcam. As usual out of the box there is no
> Linux support. The model is a Q Imaging Go-3. Their website doesn't mention
> linux support except in the context of the firewire models.
> I've done a lsusb and got the following info:
> Bus 001 Device 003: ID 5354:80e3 [no model or manufacturer info]

I couldn't find any info about your webcam, but this guy
(http://mxhaard.free.fr/) has done a lot of webcam work. You might want
to try the media-video/gspcav1 ebuild and the spca driver and see.

HTH,
--
Iain Buchanan <iaindb at netspace dot net dot au>

"And I don't like doing silly things (except on purpose)."
-- Larry Wall in <1992Jul3.191825.14435@netlabs.com>

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digital camera - Longshot!
 

Matthew R. Lee <gentoo <at> matthewlee.org> writes:


> I've just taken delivery of a shiny new microscope with a digital imaging
> system. Essentially a fancy usb webcam. >
> I've looked through various webcam, gentoo-wiki, and V4L sites to see if those
> IDs mean anything, but no luck sofar. I even tried googling them. Truth is
> I'm not sure what they actually refer to.



You *might* find useful information or help here:

http://www.usb.org/developers/


I think wireshark can be used to sniff the usb(buss).

if you use XP/vista, then look here:
http://www.pcausa.com/Utilities/UsbSnoop/default.htm


You might also find another useful software package in
/usr/portage/net-analyzer
to help you diagnose and figure out what to do with usb.


In all operating systems there are generic device drivers
that work for different classes of usb devices. So, your device,
just might work with a general purpose (class) usb driver,
but it's no guarantee. If it does, you might find a way
to use either a generic usb driver or a vendor specific
usb driver under windows.

hth,


James

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digital camera - Longshot!
 

Matthew R. Lee <gentoo <at> matthewlee.org> writes:

>
> Dear All,
> I've just taken delivery of a shiny new microscope with a digital imaging
> system. Essentially a fancy usb webcam. As usual out of the box there is no
> Linux support. The model is a Q Imaging Go-3. Their website doesn't mention
> linux support except in the context of the firewire models.


http://www.qimaging.com/products/cameras/documentation/

Says:
"The Go Series use superior CMOS sensors which take advantage of USB 2.0
plug-n-play interfaces under Windows supported operating systems. The
MicroPublisher cameras use CCD technology combined with the sustained data
performance of FireWire to offer superior color imaging and performance for
Windows, Mac and Linux based operating systems. Both the Go and MicroPublisher
series cameras come with QCapture Suite and QCapture Pro software designed for
high speed performance preview and capture functions. A Software Development Kit
is available for easy interfacing with custom software. QImaging cameras are
compatible with a large selection of life science and industrial software for
microscope, machine vision and video streaming applications. "


Oh by the way, in my previous post I mentioned "classes of usb
drivers". Take a look here:

http://www.usb.org/developers/defined_class

A generic class driver under linux just might work for your device,
since it is bascially a "web cam". Vendors most often try to get
their products to use the generic class drivers, so they work
out of the box with the various operating systems.

Surely there is a way to make one of their microscopes work with linux?


I'd be interested in this, if they do not cost too much.....


James

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digital camera - Longshot!
 

On Friday 20 June 2008 11:02:28 James wrote:
> Matthew R. Lee <gentoo <at> matthewlee.org> writes:
> > Dear All,
> > I've just taken delivery of a shiny new microscope with a digital imaging
> > system. Essentially a fancy usb webcam. As usual out of the box there is
> > no Linux support. The model is a Q Imaging Go-3. Their website doesn't
> > mention linux support except in the context of the firewire models.
>
> http://www.qimaging.com/products/cameras/documentation/
>
> Says:
> "The Go Series use superior CMOS sensors which take advantage of USB 2.0
> plug-n-play interfaces under Windows supported operating systems. The
> MicroPublisher cameras use CCD technology combined with the sustained data
> performance of FireWire to offer superior color imaging and performance for
> Windows, Mac and Linux based operating systems. Both the Go and
> MicroPublisher series cameras come with QCapture Suite and QCapture Pro
> software designed for high speed performance preview and capture functions.
> A Software Development Kit is available for easy interfacing with custom
> software. QImaging cameras are compatible with a large selection of life
> science and industrial software for microscope, machine vision and video
> streaming applications. "
>
>
> Oh by the way, in my previous post I mentioned "classes of usb
> drivers". Take a look here:
>
> http://www.usb.org/developers/defined_class
>
> A generic class driver under linux just might work for your device,
> since it is bascially a "web cam". Vendors most often try to get
> their products to use the generic class drivers, so they work
> out of the box with the various operating systems.
>
> Surely there is a way to make one of their microscopes work with linux?
>
>
> I'd be interested in this, if they do not cost too much.....
>
>
> James

Thanks for the info, I haven't got time to do anything about this until the
weekend. Hopefully it will just work. As for the cost, it is excessivly
spendy. The cost was around 2.3 million chilean pesos, that's about £2300 or
$4600 US. Yeah! seemed exhorbitant to me, but I'm not paying for it.
Saludos
Matt

--
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Dr. Matthew R. Lee
Instituto Biologia Marina 'Jurgen Winter'
Universidad Austral de Chile
Campus Isla Teja
Valdivia

matt@matthewlee.org

URL: meiochile.matthewlee.org
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