[Gloucs] l'Espion Camera (was USB Key Drive)

[Guy Edwards]

On Tue, 2002-08-27 at 17:17, Mick Brooks wrote:
> I had to do all of this on the Mandrake box before it would work. I never got 
> it going through gphoto though, but I did find a little program called pencam 
> that does the trick.

I think I read about that when I was googling a while ago. The espion
has the same chipset as the pencam model I think.

> Have you played with the continuous shooting thing yet? If you name all of 
> the files *_0001.ppm through *_0080.ppm (a bit of Perl sorts that for me) the 
> Gimp will do the right thing very quickly and you can create little animated 
> gifs (little in pixels, large in diskspace required - 1.5Mb). I'm not about 
> to inflict them on the web, but they're fine for local viewing. I'll 
> investigate making mpegs when I get a round tuit.

I will try this after the meeting. Incidentally, the windows 2k drivers
are completly screwed (poor packaging) and it can take a few hours to
fix. Under Linux - no problems.

Under windows the software that comes with it turns them into short avi
files but you can't spec which pictures to include, it just does
everything on the camera. So if you've taken 2 stills a 3 second video
shot, and then another still, you get lots of wierd frames mixed in with
your video.

On the negative side I wish it took compactflash so you dont have to leg
it back to a computer to try and download the pictures before the
battery goes flat.

Any luck as a webcam 8 under Linux? (realtime not uploading an image
every x sec/min) should do 16fps at full resolution.

Also have you worked out how to trick it into taking a picture in low
light conditions? In case you haven't, wack it onto video mode and just
take 1 frame (you'll need a good trigger finger).

Guy