Serial camera + RS232 > USB adapter

[Colin J Thomson - G6AVK]

On Saturday 27 January 2007 10:49:57 pm David Fletcher wrote:
> On Saturday 27 January 2007 22:38, Colin J Thomson - G6AVK wrote:
> > Its a Sanyo VPC-G200E, listed in digKam so hoped the adapter my work
> > (somehow)

> Out of interest, I just installed digikam and had a quick play myself. I
> have an Olympus C2100-UZ. Not the oldest digital camera around here I'm
> sure but it's getting on a bit.
>
> What I found out is:-
>
> 1) It refuses to work with the USB connection. It's a pre mount as mass
> storage type device and talks a special protocol that digikam seems to not
> know properly, so far as I can tell.
>
> 2) This camera also has a serial socket. So I just got the box out of the
> attic and retrieved the serial cable. Plugged it into a serial-USB adaptor
> and.... nothing happened. Looked in /dev. The device appears as ttyUSB0.
> Digikam only allows you to select /dev/ttyS0 - /dev/ttyS3 I think it was.
> So shut down digikam and open the file
> ~/.kde/share/apps/digikam/cameras.xml with a text editor and hack it to
> look something like this:-
>
> <!DOCTYPE XMLCameraList>
> <cameralist client="digikam" version="1.1" >
>  <item port="serial:/dev/ttyUSB0" title="Olympus C-2100UZ" model="Olympus
> C-2100UZ" path="/" lastaccess="2007-01-27T22:39:41" />
> </cameralist>

OK this was very useful indeed, I can get the Camera "seen" now with digiKam 
but its the same as before when I used the direct serial  connection. Gphoto2 
times out after some retries. This is due to the serial speed being too fast @
115k,  I cannot seem to change/set the speed in the xml file for digiKam. 
There is a digikam bug for this from way back in 2002 in that you cannot 
select port speeds.

I have managed to grab some info using gphoto2:

gphoto2  --list-files --port /dev/ttyUSB0 --speed="9600" --camera="Sanyo 
VPC-G200" 
There are 3 files in folder '/'.
#1     P1010001.JPG               rd    50 KB image/jpeg
#2     P1010002.JPG               rd    51 KB image/jpeg
#3     P1010003.JPG               rd    48 KB image/jpeg

An interesting exercise.. 
Maybe it is time to get a newer Camera as it is very slow downloading the 
files. :)

Thanks for all the ideas

Colin
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Fedora Core 6 ("Zod")
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