Hi!

quoted

What is reasonable camera application for testing?

N900 looks like a low-end digital camera. I have now have the hardware
working (can set focus to X cm using command line), but that's not
going to be useful for taking photos.

I guess you already knew about omap3camd; it's proprietary but from purely
practical point of view it'd be an option to support taking photos on the
N900. That would not be extensible any way, the best possible functionality
is limited what the daemon implements.

I'm just mentioning the option of implementing wrapper for the omap3camd so
that it can work with upsteam APIs, I don't propose that however.

I knew it existed, but I'd prefer not to touch proprietary code.

quoted

In particular, who is going to do computation neccessary for
autofocus, whitebalance and exposure/gain?

I think libv4l itself has algorithms to control at least some of these. It
relies on the image data so the CPU time consumption will be high.

AFAIR Laurent has also worked on implementing some algorithms that use the
histogram and some of the statistics. Add him to cc list.

Aha, good, let me know.

quoted

There's http://fcam.garage.maemo.org/gettingStarted.html that should
work on maemo, but a) it is not in Debian, b) it has non-trivial
dependencies and c) will be a lot of fun to get working...

(and d), will not be too useful, anyway, due to 1sec shutter lag:

I believe this will be shorter nowadays. I don't remember the exact
technical solution which the text below refers to but I'm pretty sure it'll
be better with the current upstream. API-wise, there's work to be done there
(to port FCAM to upsteram APIs) but it's a possibility.

I took a look at fcam-dev in the meantime... and it does not look too
bad. It is quite n900-specific -- it needs hardware support for
histograms and sharpness maps -- but it should not be too hard to
modify.

Relying on hardware support without having fallback software
implementation feels wrong, but... it should actually be ok as I
already have the hardware...

(Is there accepted "upstream" for it?)
									Pavel
-- 
(english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek
(cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html