[mdlug] Wall wart devices

[David McMillan]

On 2/6/2011 12:39 PM, Garry Stahl wrote:
> David McMillan wrote:
>> 	Anyway, has anyone seen anything like this?  A decent instructable to
>> use as a jumping-off point would be sufficient -- I just keep coming up
>> empty using Google.
>>
>
> This might help.  Modeler supply store. A tiny wireless camera with 12
> hour battery life.  You provide the mounting.
>
> http://www.micromark.com/Wireless-Micro-Camera-System-With-Sound-24-Ghz,8776.html
>
> If you are willing to hack consider taking a small wall wart and making
> a big wall wart out of it.
>

	Well, I'm kind of ricocheting around.  I had a brainstorm (or 
brainfart, as the case may be), and grabbed one of those little 
micro-cams once I realized I could power it off a 9V battery, then got a 
"VHS-to-DVD" ripping device that would (I thought) convert composite 
(single RCA-jack) video signal from the camera's receiver into a 
USB-webcam-like signal readable by motion.
	Well... almost.
	My older Ubuntu install wouldn't see the converter, but Lucid Lynx did. 
  Saw it on boot and auto-mounted it as /dev/video0, slick as anything. 
  Unfortunately, something in the chain doesn't work -- the image on 
/dev/video0, while recognizably the view from the camera, has a lot of 
issues: violent constant vertical rolling, like an old 70s TV that's 
lost V-sync, and bursts of noise happening so frequently that motion, 
when I started it, was snapping images less than a second apart.
	Now, I know the video image from the camera to its receiver is good; I 
tested that using my TV's video input.  And if I use the Windows 
software that came with the RCA-to-USB converter on my XP box, it works 
fine (however, XP won't recognize the converter as it would a typical 
webcam, so my XP-based webcam intervalometer script is useless).  So 
there's got to be something about how Lynx is treating this chipset. But 
what I've been able to dig out of LinuxTV suggests that this chipset is 
well supported -- it's even in the kernel.
	So at the moment I'm a little stuck trying to figure out how to 
proceed.  Dealing with video input devices under Linux is new territory 
for me.  I'd *really* like to just find a way to get the computer to see 
the video stream from the mini-cam as if it were just another ordinary 
webcam, and then treat it accordingly.  I'm wondering if there's some 
way to maybe "tune" /dev/video0, or possibly pipe it through ffmpeg and 
"filter" out some of the problems before piping the feed to motion.