Steerable webcam

Amadeus W.M. amadeus84 at verizon.net
Sun Feb 3 20:49:08 UTC 2008


On Sun, 03 Feb 2008 16:16:55 +0000, Timothy Murphy wrote:

> Has anyone any recommendation for a steerable webcam for use with
> Linux/Fedora?
> 
> --
> Timothy Murphy
> e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie tel:
> +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
> s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland


What's a steerable webcam? I use a pan-tilt-zoom Sony EVI-D30 like this 
one:

http://www.webcam-production.com/en/video_surveillance/sony_evi-d31.php

Video goes from the camera into a framegrabber card (e.g. BT-8XX) through 
a Composite or S-Video cable. It works with any v4l/v4l2 application such 
as tvtime, xawtv, zoneminder, even kopete with jasper, etc.

The pc sends commands (pan, tilt, zoom, grab image, apperture, shutter, 
etc.) to the camera through the serial port. It also comes with motion 
detection built-in, but I never use that. The commands are well 
documented by Sony, so you can write your own drivers if you prefer, but 
there already exist such drivers (search for "visca commands").

Note that this exact model has been discontinued, and superseeded by 
newer models. I'm sure you can still buy it at a price significantly 
lower than it used to be, but still on the order of a few hundred USD. 
It works very well though. 





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