Hi,
I have acquired a RS232 to USB adapter, which is working well with FC6 (tested with GPS) briefly. My question is I have a very old Serial port digital camera that digiKam refuses to work with, Its listed but I have never managed to get it to work. I had to resort to using the M$ software in Wine.
I wonder if it would be possible to use the USB>Serial adapter somehow, googleing around has yet to shed any information on this.
Cheers Colin
On Saturday 27 January 2007 21:35, Colin J Thomson - G6AVK wrote:
Hi,
I have acquired a RS232 to USB adapter, which is working well with FC6 (tested with GPS) briefly. My question is I have a very old Serial port digital camera that digiKam refuses to work with, Its listed but I have never managed to get it to work. I had to resort to using the M$ software in Wine.
I wonder if it would be possible to use the USB>Serial adapter somehow, googleing around has yet to shed any information on this.
What model is the camera? Have you tried the linux hardware compatibility list?
Anne
On Saturday 27 January 2007 22:20, Anne Wilson wrote:
On Saturday 27 January 2007 21:35, Colin J Thomson - G6AVK wrote:
Hi,
I have acquired a RS232 to USB adapter, which is working well with FC6 (tested with GPS) briefly. My question is I have a very old Serial port digital camera that digiKam refuses to work with, Its listed but I have never managed to get it to work. I had to resort to using the M$ software in Wine.
I wonder if it would be possible to use the USB>Serial adapter somehow, googleing around has yet to shed any information on this.
What model is the camera? Have you tried the linux hardware compatibility list?
If it's pre-usb you may have some difficulty finding information. You may find something helpful here, though:
http://www.teaser.fr/~hfiguiere/linux/digicam.html
http://www.gphoto.org/proj/libgphoto2/support.php
Then
http://www.linux-usb.org/gadget/
does mention
Serial ... this exposes a tty style serial line interface, usable with Minicom and similar tools. (There's no serial console support at this time.) Most Linux hosts can talk to this using the generic usb-serial driver.
Don't know if any of this will help.
Anne
On Saturday 27 January 2007 10:37:06 pm Anne Wilson wrote:
On Saturday 27 January 2007 22:20, Anne Wilson wrote:
On Saturday 27 January 2007 21:35, Colin J Thomson - G6AVK wrote:
Hi,
I have acquired a RS232 to USB adapter, which is working well with FC6 (tested with GPS) briefly. My question is I have a very old Serial port digital camera that digiKam refuses to work with, Its listed but I have never managed to get it to work. I had to resort to using the M$ software in Wine.
I wonder if it would be possible to use the USB>Serial adapter somehow, googleing around has yet to shed any information on this.
What model is the camera? Have you tried the linux hardware compatibility list?
If it's pre-usb you may have some difficulty finding information. You may find something helpful here, though:
http://www.teaser.fr/~hfiguiere/linux/digicam.html
http://www.gphoto.org/proj/libgphoto2/support.php
Then
Many thanks for the links Anne, something for me to look at tomorrow
Cheers
Colin
On Saturday 27 January 2007 10:20:44 pm Anne Wilson wrote:
On Saturday 27 January 2007 21:35, Colin J Thomson - G6AVK wrote:
Hi,
I have acquired a RS232 to USB adapter, which is working well with FC6 (tested with GPS) briefly. My question is I have a very old Serial port digital camera that digiKam refuses to work with, Its listed but I have never managed to get it to work. I had to resort to using the M$ software in Wine.
I wonder if it would be possible to use the USB>Serial adapter somehow, googleing around has yet to shed any information on this.
What model is the camera?
Its a Sanyo VPC-G200E, listed in digKam so hoped the adapter my work (somehow)
Have you tried the linux hardware compatibility list?
Ah no, I'll take a look there..
Thanks
Colin
On Saturday 27 January 2007 22:38, Colin J Thomson - G6AVK wrote:
On Saturday 27 January 2007 10:20:44 pm Anne Wilson wrote:
Its a Sanyo VPC-G200E, listed in digKam so hoped the adapter my work (somehow)
Have you tried the linux hardware compatibility list?
Ah no, I'll take a look there..
Thanks
Colin
Fedora Core 6 ("Zod") KDE-Redhat-3.5.6-3.fc6 Registered Linux user number #342953
Out of interest, I just installed digikam and had a quick play myself. I have an Olympus C2100-UZ. Not the oldest digital camera around here I'm sure but it's getting on a bit.
What I found out is:-
1) It refuses to work with the USB connection. It's a pre mount as mass storage type device and talks a special protocol that digikam seems to not know properly, so far as I can tell.
2) This camera also has a serial socket. So I just got the box out of the attic and retrieved the serial cable. Plugged it into a serial-USB adaptor and.... nothing happened. Looked in /dev. The device appears as ttyUSB0. Digikam only allows you to select /dev/ttyS0 - /dev/ttyS3 I think it was. So shut down digikam and open the file ~/.kde/share/apps/digikam/cameras.xml with a text editor and hack it to look something like this:-
<!DOCTYPE XMLCameraList> <cameralist client="digikam" version="1.1" > <item port="serial:/dev/ttyUSB0" title="Olympus C-2100UZ" model="Olympus C-2100UZ" path="/" lastaccess="2007-01-27T22:39:41" /> </cameralist>
Save and start digikam. Now it works! Slow but I just downloaded a photograph from my camera.
Hope this gets you going.
Dave Fletcher
On Sat, 2007-01-27 at 22:49 +0000, David Fletcher wrote:
Plugged it into a serial-USB adaptor and.... nothing happened. Looked in /dev. The device appears as ttyUSB0. Digikam only allows you to select /dev/ttyS0 - /dev/ttyS3 I think it was.
Just wondering if you could symlink from a ttyS to a ttyUSB...
Tim wrote:
On Sat, 2007-01-27 at 22:49 +0000, David Fletcher wrote:
Plugged it into a serial-USB adaptor and.... nothing happened. Looked in /dev. The device appears as ttyUSB0. Digikam only allows you to select /dev/ttyS0 - /dev/ttyS3 I think it was.
Just wondering if you could symlink from a ttyS to a ttyUSB...
If you use a symlink I'd suggest you create a file called /etc/udev/rules.d/10-local.rules and put something similar to the following in it: BUS=="usb",KERNEL=="ttyUSB*", SYMLINK+="ttyS0", GROUP="uucp"
my only concern is /dev/ttyS0 through /dev/ttyS3 are generally the serial ports on the machine. Of course they may not exist so you might just want to delete them first.
Jeff
On Sunday 28 January 2007 01:27, Jeffrey Ross wrote:
If you use a symlink I'd suggest you create a file called /etc/udev/rules.d/10-local.rules and put something similar to the following in it: BUS=="usb",KERNEL=="ttyUSB*", SYMLINK+="ttyS0", GROUP="uucp"
my only concern is /dev/ttyS0 through /dev/ttyS3 are generally the serial ports on the machine. Of course they may not exist so you might just want to delete them first.
Jeff
What's wrong with just getting the author to add a couple of ttyUSB paths to the source, and doing a recompile i.e. sort it out properly? I could probably do this myself, but I don't really have any further interest in it - after finding out how slow it was to download the contents of a 128MB SmartMedia card via the connections provided by the camera, I've been taking out the card and reading the contents with an adaptor ever since.
Dave Fletcher
On Saturday 27 January 2007 10:49:57 pm David Fletcher wrote:
On Saturday 27 January 2007 22:38, Colin J Thomson - G6AVK wrote:
Its a Sanyo VPC-G200E, listed in digKam so hoped the adapter my work (somehow)
Out of interest, I just installed digikam and had a quick play myself. I have an Olympus C2100-UZ. Not the oldest digital camera around here I'm sure but it's getting on a bit.
What I found out is:-
- It refuses to work with the USB connection. It's a pre mount as mass
storage type device and talks a special protocol that digikam seems to not know properly, so far as I can tell.
- This camera also has a serial socket. So I just got the box out of the
attic and retrieved the serial cable. Plugged it into a serial-USB adaptor and.... nothing happened. Looked in /dev. The device appears as ttyUSB0. Digikam only allows you to select /dev/ttyS0 - /dev/ttyS3 I think it was. So shut down digikam and open the file ~/.kde/share/apps/digikam/cameras.xml with a text editor and hack it to look something like this:-
<!DOCTYPE XMLCameraList>
<cameralist client="digikam" version="1.1" > <item port="serial:/dev/ttyUSB0" title="Olympus C-2100UZ" model="Olympus C-2100UZ" path="/" lastaccess="2007-01-27T22:39:41" /> </cameralist>
OK this was very useful indeed, I can get the Camera "seen" now with digiKam but its the same as before when I used the direct serial connection. Gphoto2 times out after some retries. This is due to the serial speed being too fast @ 115k, I cannot seem to change/set the speed in the xml file for digiKam. There is a digikam bug for this from way back in 2002 in that you cannot select port speeds.
I have managed to grab some info using gphoto2:
gphoto2 --list-files --port /dev/ttyUSB0 --speed="9600" --camera="Sanyo VPC-G200" There are 3 files in folder '/'. #1 P1010001.JPG rd 50 KB image/jpeg #2 P1010002.JPG rd 51 KB image/jpeg #3 P1010003.JPG rd 48 KB image/jpeg
An interesting exercise.. Maybe it is time to get a newer Camera as it is very slow downloading the files. :)
Thanks for all the ideas
Colin
On Sunday 28 January 2007 11:54, Colin J Thomson - G6AVK wrote:
OK this was very useful indeed, I can get the Camera "seen" now with digiKam but its the same as before when I used the direct serial connection. Gphoto2 times out after some retries. This is due to the serial speed being too fast @ 115k, I cannot seem to change/set the speed in the xml file for digiKam. There is a digikam bug for this from way back in 2002 in that you cannot select port speeds.
I have managed to grab some info using gphoto2:
gphoto2 --list-files --port /dev/ttyUSB0 --speed="9600" --camera="Sanyo VPC-G200" There are 3 files in folder '/'. #1 P1010001.JPG rd 50 KB image/jpeg #2 P1010002.JPG rd 51 KB image/jpeg #3 P1010003.JPG rd 48 KB image/jpeg
An interesting exercise.. Maybe it is time to get a newer Camera as it is very slow downloading the files. :)
A much cheaper option is to use a card reader :-)
Anne
On Sun, 2007-01-28 at 12:03 +0000, Anne Wilson wrote:
A much cheaper option is to use a card reader :-)
I don't know if it's cheaper, but there's a lot of conveniences:
Your camera isn't tied to the computer. You don't flatten your batteries. It does seem quicker even than the top USB 2.0 speed. You don't need special camera drivers. You're not stuck with an unsupported camera. Things like gThumb can import from cards like it does with cameras.
Colin J Thomson - G6AVK wrote:
Hi,
I have acquired a RS232 to USB adapter, which is working well with FC6 (tested with GPS) briefly. My question is I have a very old Serial port digital camera that digiKam refuses to work with, Its listed but I have never managed to get it to work. I had to resort to using the M$ software in Wine.
I wonder if it would be possible to use the USB>Serial adapter somehow, googleing around has yet to shed any information on this.
Cheers Colin
One thing to be careful about when using USB to RS232 adapters is that most of the ones I have seen do not support the status/control lines. This can cause problems with devices that use hardware handshaking, or use the status lines for device detection. For example, you can not control a "dumb" UPS. You may have problems using a modem on them. If the camera or software depends on them, then it will also fail.
Mikkel
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Anne Wilson -
Colin J Thomson -
David Fletcher -
Jeffrey Ross -
Mikkel -
Tim