What is it?

QuickCam The QuickCam is a billiard-ball sized camera. It's available in black-and-white or color, and interfaces with the parallel port of a PC.

Along with dozens of other people, I've worked on creating a library for accessing the QuickCam under Linux.

If you have an old Connectix B&W QuickCam camera and you're running Linux on your machine, you can use this software to grab individual images or to show a view from the camera in an X window.

Any interesting features?

The work I did on this driver was mostly an incremental improvement to the work that had been done by others. I worked from a code base that could already fetch and display images from the QuickCam. I added support for the "bidirectional" mode of the Cam, which allows pictures to be pulled across about four times faster. I also added some code to remove speckling and do edge detection.

I also created man pages to explain the plethora of flags that were added.

What's going on now?

The latest released version of my code is 0.91. I have a non-released 0.92 on my home machine; the most significant improvement in 0.92 is that the library is threaded. This makes almost no difference on my uniprocessor machine, but might help multiprocessor machines. The project was mostly a spur for me to learn POSIX threads.

What does the future hold?

I have mostly stopped working on the QuickCam at this point, since the only other project I was interested in doing (merging the B&W and Color versions of the driver) is being more capably handled by others.

I'm still using my QuickCam, I'm just not developing driver software for it. I've built a pan-and-tilt platform for it, and I'm thinking of allowing it to be controlled through a CGI script. But that hasn't happened yet.

How do I download this great code?

The latest released version of my code is 0.91.
This page works best with Lynx.
mail me or go home.