Camera not recognized

[MarkHaysHarris777]

Well, after working with this all day (among other things) I came to the conclusion that the dependencies are so badly broken on the latest debian build that it might not be worth trying to straighten them out. I received a PM from @lex stating essentially the same thing, and asking me if I could try the previous image. 

I do have the previous image archived, so I pulled it out and dusted it off.  In the mean time a couple of us were talking about v4l2 and the discussion came around to "what's so special about guvcview?"  Any v4l2 client should work with the camera and the s5k4ec vfe_v4l2 drivers;   vlc, for instance. 

So, I went backward to the previous debian build , replaced the dtb with the camera turned on , and opened up vlc;  low and behold , I had very poor quality video coming from my camera (with horrible artifacts, green streaks, etc) both from the *stream* and from the open capture modes;  very intermittently.  Also, the camera got very hot (it gets warm anyways, I have a heatsink on mine) which was not normal in my experience. 

There appear to be three issues related to running the camera on gnu+linux (I'm using debian):  1) the dtb file enabling the camera, 2) the drivers s5k4ec, and vfe_v4l2,  and 3) the dependencies for building the modified guvcview utility;  that said, the overall issue is that if the camera is enabled, and the drivers are functioning, any v4l2 client should be able to attach to the camera and that is just not happening. 

I am very interested in knowing what @lex did to get guvcview to work *at all* with the dtb and drivers that we have... and I am very interested in knowing why the vlc ( a v4l2 client ) will not work with our dtb and drivers either.

I have tossed the idea back to @lex that perhaps there is a static guvcview that might be built off-board and then made available as a binary blob to alleviate the build headache for people who just want the video to work, but who are not willing to go to all this hassle. I am waiting to hear back from @lex on that.

The other option is to clean up the dependencies in debian, perhaps simplify the build requirements for guvcview. 


PS.  After my camera overheated (what-ever I mean by that) I moved the camera to my desk Android system and opened the camera app...   beautiful color images galore...  

(I'm gonna think about this tomorrow)