Tony Kmoch

As I described here, I’ve bought Asus WL-500g Premium router where I installed Kamikaze 7.09 firmware to. I am running on Linux 2.4 kernel, because 2.6 doesn’t support wifi on my router (see here).

I’d like to connect some USB webcam, but even I spent a lot of time trying to find some usable driver, I didn’t suceed so far.

Here are drivers which are not usable for my case:

• UVC video driver (kmod-video-uvc) supports only >= 2.6 kernels
• ov51x-jpg also supports only >= 2.6 kernels
• qc-usb driver for Logitech webcams (download) didn’t work for me

These drivers may work:

• ov51x driver may work, but I didn’t find binaries for Kamikaze
• spca5xx (download or as a ipkg package kmod-usb-spca5xx-le) seems to be most perspective for me
• OpenWrt Kamikaze 7.09 has directly support using ipkg for pwc driver. These cams listed are pretty good and pretty expensive ;-).

Programs supported

Copied from this discussion:

• spca5xx_le - spcacat, servfox
• spca5xx - spcacat, servfox, motion, palantir, mvc, getjpeg

Solution

Based on this talk, I decided to buy webcam “Labtec webcam pro”. Instructions based on this great tutorial (in polish, but I guess you don’t mind) are following:

• Connect the webcam to router. Restart it. You should get in “dmesg” output this:

  usb.c: USB device 2 (vend/prod 0x46d/0x8a2) is not claimed by any active driver.

  That sound great, because this vend/prod is supported by spca5xx

• Install usb stuff, if not installed:

  ipkg install kmod-usb-core kmod-usb-uhci kmod-usb2

• Install the spca5xx light edition driver:

  ipkg install http://download.czechit.net/openwrt/kmod-usb-spca5xx-le_2.4.34-brcm-1_mipsel.ipk

• Everytime after restart of the router, you have to load the modules using:

  insmod videodev
  insmod spca5xx

• Now, if you check “dmesg”, you should get:

  Linux video capture interface: v1.00
  usb.c: registered new driver spca5xx
  spca_core.c: USB SPCA5XX camera found. Type Labtec Webcam Pro Zc0302 + Hdcs2020
  spca_core.c: spca5xx driver 00.57.08LE registered

• Search for the device, make link for spcacat and install this software for downloading images from webcam:

  ls -al /dev/v4l/*
  ln -s /dev/v4l/video0 /dev/video0
  cd /tmp
  wget http://download.czechit.net/openwrt/spcacat.gz
  gunzip spcacat.gz
  mv spcacat /usr/bin
  chmod +x /usr/bin/spcacat
  ipkg install libpthread libgcc

• To make one “shot” to file SpcaPict.jpg use:

  spcacat -d /dev/video0 -g -s 640x480 -f jpg -o -N 1 -p 100

Warning: Based on this post, it’s possible that connecting 2 and more cams won’t be easy.

Links

• Webcam tutorial with compiled packages for OpenWrt