webcam innerds

i read theres a 16 foot limit to USB cables without boost or hubs so i was wondering if i can un-solder the optic component from the webcam circuit board and extend just that to

30-40 feet.

also wondering if how to find high quality image in the cheap webcams. havent found a site dedicated to the insides and performance comparisons. i bought a few starting withe the "webcam2" or "webcam II" offered by seller "Dream"-something. those are claimed to have "dual core" and supposedly can do 160 F/s. I dont have any software that can verify that tho.

It does however have a nice picture combined with auto white levels. theres a cheaper one with a ver clear picture but only manual levels. am i wrong ior isnt that a feature of the driver more than the device?

Reply to
divx dude
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May be 16 inches.

Nop.

Or smartphones. Android phones are getting cheaper and come with pretty good cameras.

Reply to
linnix

In all likelihood, no.

If you can live with 32', try this:

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($14) (this will appear as a hub to your PC). If you need a longer distance but can live with USB 1.1 (12Mbps), try this:
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($11). If you need a longer distance and also need high-speed USB 2.0 (480Mbps), I know of no inexpensive solutions... but if you're got $300+ to burn, try this:
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(there are probably cheaper options available, but it'll still likely be >$100).

Those sound like entirely meaningless spec. Dual core what? 160 frames/second can be done on pretty much any sensor, but image quality will suffer in direct proportion to what you get at 30 frames/second... so 160 frames/second alone tells you nothing about image quality.

Usually (but I don't really know enough to say for certain) auto white levelling can be performed by the camera itself; the driver is just telling it to enable or disable this functionality.

---Joel

Reply to
Joel Koltner

Actually, it's possible, depends on how much you want to spend.

If you unsolder the image sensor, you can hookup 16 to 24 data lines, hsync, vsync and several control signals. To run 30 feet, you can multiplex the signals into a fiber link. You can use one FPGA for multiplexing and another for demultiplexing.

On the other hand, you can use a usb host micro to grab the image first, then compress and multiplex it into the fiber link. With image compression, you can use micros for multiplexing/demultiplexing at lower data rate.

Reply to
linnix

The USB wiring limit is 5 meters; other wiring schemes, like Ethernet, go farther (10baseT Ethernet is good for 100 meters, about ten times the distance you're looking for). And non-digital wiring to a CCTV camera, like in a security camera setup, is usually an analog signal on a coaxial cable. Analog is good for a few hundred feet.

And, of course, you can get wireless cameras; under-$100 will get you a WiFi webcam that runs on batteries,

If you really want to use an existing USB camera, two extensions will suffice to get the cord to the length you want;

Reply to
whit3rd

I ran a webcam 70 feet using two cheap 30' active extender cables and

10' of passive. It worked fine.

John

Reply to
John Larkin

No.

$18.53, free shiping from China:

--
You can't fix stupid. You can't even put a Band-Aid? on it, because it's
Teflon coated.
Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

"John Larkin" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

I have tried the Cat5 extender and those do work well, even at usb 1.0. (providing your camera will work at 1.0)

Just don't hook up a x-over cable ;)

Cheers

Reply to
Martin Riddle

.
.

i thought i read somewhere a guy made his own 30 foot USB extender cable from cat5 wire and it worked for him. apparently not tho everywhere else i read its 16 feet max due to "timing" but a timing error just drops a frame or few doesnt it? i guess i need to make a long cable and try it for myself.

do i need high speed connections to get good security video and video motion detect?

Reply to
divx dude

Sure you can. All you gotta do is get the application note from the unknown vendor and engineer an interface to whatever interface you want to use...and write drivers for both ends...and package it all. No problem ;-)

What are you trying to accomplish? What's your definition of "high quality"? What's you definition of "cheap"? Do you really need 160F/S?

Be aware that webcam specs are often INFLATED and MISLEADING. I've found many ebay sales claiming huge resolution numbers, but nowhere stated the actual native resolution of the sensor. Be aware that most webcams and many point-and-shoot cameras have pixel resolution numbers that cannot be supported by the resolving power of the lens. Don't get me started on low light performance.

Using MY definitions of cheap and high resolution... The Intel CS330-CS630 series of cameras has the clearest image of any cheap webcam I've encountered. It's only 640x480, but it's a CCD and very sharp relative to alternatives. Intel sold a zillion of them so they're available at garage sales somewhere between 25-cents and free. The CS430 has a video output that works over long distances, but it's fuzzy compared to digital.

Every time I've contemplated a remote usb camera, it always came down to putting a laptop close to the camera and let it do format conversion, storage, whatever preprocessing is required. Old laptops in the 2GHz. range can be had for a couple of bucks... less if they have a busted display. That's cheaper than an extender.

I intended to to surveillance. Problem was that 640x480 was not sufficient to identify a perp...nor was 1280x1024 or any other resolution I could afford. Just watch the evening news. They're always putting up fuzzy pix of robberies and asking for help identifying the perp...good luck with that... Don't spend a lot of money on one part of the system if the total system still won't do what you want...and a really cheap one will do just as well.

Again...using MY definition of cheap and clear pix... YMMV

Reply to
mike

mike > [...] Just watch the evening news. =A0They're mike > always putting up fuzzy pix of robberies mike > and asking for help identifying the perp... mike > good luck with that... [...]

Y'know, when I see those I question whether they even want to actually catch the robbers!

I thought perhaps it was similar to the way they don't want to let anybody know how much cash the robbers actually got, or early hacker thefts where they refused to even report them for fear of PR problems??

Reply to
Greegor

ient

Basically buy an IP camera and be done with it. Higher res than NTSC and you are at ethernet limits. It is ironic how far you can bus around the video from a camera versus the usb signal. I wonder if that is why analog video and frame grabbers lasted so long on the market?

Reply to
miso

I mis-spoke. the CS430 has a video INPUT that you can view over usb.

Reply to
mike

just putting up some webcams around the house..

Reply to
divx dude

On a sunny day (Wed, 30 Mar 2011 02:16:56 -0700 (PDT)) it happened divx dude wrote in :

I agree with the other posters that for 'further away' you should use an ethernet based webcam. For < 100 Euro you can buy one these days with pan and tilt control, and mpeg4 output. You will apreciate that once you are away from home and want to look at stuff. Assuming you can connect to your home server IP. For the one in the room next to your PC, use a USB webcam perhaps.

Reply to
Jan Panteltje

This one here seems popular:

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True, but if you just want to take an occasional snapshot, it seems that with the IP-based camera there's sometimes a fair amount of sleuthing needed to find the right FTP or HTTP port to just get a single picture... whereas with a (UVC-type) webcam, you can just use command-line tools you likely already have, like guvcview.

For that matter, pan/tilt controls are ...mostly... standardized on UVC webcams, whereas for IP-based cameras you're again back to having to figure it out on a camera-by-camera basis, it seems.

That being said, if one is going to head the IP-based camera route, this one looks pretty good:

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-- lots of Linux support!

---Joel

Reply to
Joel Koltner

On a sunny day (Wed, 30 Mar 2011 09:07:06 -0700) it happened "Joel Koltner" wrote in :

I use a DLink DCS-900, and wrote the Linux side software for it, it is a command line tool that can stream to disk, or some encoder, and also can pop an X window, has on screen clock, motion detection, what have you.

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For the pan and tilt I did a little PIC project with model servos:
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To just get an X display from anywhere you just type: mcamip -x -a IP -p 80 -u USERNAME -W PASSWORD I even have it on the laptop.

The nice thing about my soft for the DCS-900 is that it requires no kernel driver. It is a user space server that does all the interfacing to that camera. It runs 24/7 here encoding to H264 piping through ffmpeg. Twice a day a new file is started from crontab, always the three latest files are kept, say about a day and a half. Bit of scripting was all that is needed for that. Quality is better than many IP cameras, as this one is now rather old and outputs JPEG, so it does not have the motion artefacts of a mpg stream camera. It does use a lot of bandwidth on the LAN though. Especially since it now runs via wireless, so I have it run at 2 fps to save resources. But I can still watch TV via the LAN at the same time :-)

Reply to
Jan Panteltje

Definitely more work than with a UVC webcam. :-) Granted, sincey you've already done it, no skin off of my back!

I don't suppose you have a few snapshot or video samples available somewhere?

---Joel

Reply to
Joel Koltner

d

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ith a

For snapshots, we use the LG VS740 camera (2000 x 1500) and pull it out of USB. For example: "adb pull /mnt/sdcard/DCIM/camera/*.jpg". USB mass storage mode is also possible, but the pull-down menu is annoying.

There are Android Debug Bridge (ADB) drivers for Linux and Window, we just need to work on USB-NET for embedded devices.

Reply to
linnix

On a sunny day (Wed, 30 Mar 2011 10:54:10 -0700) it happened "Joel Koltner" wrote in :

Well it is a security cam, so all is classified :-) What I forgot to mention is that mcamip (my software) can output mjpeg tools YUV format to stdout. I wanted to follow the old Unix philosophy to use programs as 'filters' That means you can pipe to the next one, for example via all mjpeg tools, mplayer, ffmpeg, transcode, all tools that will do stdin to stdout. So that makes video processing much more fun. You can go back onto the web by piping it via netcat, The *input* from mcamip connects to the webserver in the DCS900 camera.

DCS900 - ethernet - ffmpeg - transcode - subtitler - any mjpegtools filters you want- [mplayer] [- netcat - internet - mcamip] - [X] any combination you like. I think the big mistake that video for Linux is, is not to see this simplicity, Nevertheless I did that interface too, also got it working with Skype. There have been hundreds of downloads, this is a very decent camera, and been used a lot in security systems. I added on screen text too, from a text configuration file, also in colour of course.

I did a similar modification of the universal USB driver for webcams so it can output mjpeg tools YUV too, and avoid video for Linux, it is somewhere on my site, find it via 'downloads' perhaps. I use that for my Logitech USB webcams.

Reply to
Jan Panteltje

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