WebCam on Slug

Hi all,
I just added an old webcam on my slug and wanted to share in here. First of all if you want to add webcam to your system go ahead and upgrade your system as explained in the previous post.

Anyway, I upgraded my system and plugged in the webcam to one of the empty slots. Surprisingly the green webcam light was on which means it if successfully loaded. I checked lsusb

Bus 002 Device 003: ID 0ac8:301b Z-Star Microelectronics Corp. ZC0301 WebCam

then video port by typing ls /dev/video* and I had /dev/video0 in there. But when I tried to get some pictures it failed...

It was automatically loading zc0301 module (check with lsmod) but I soon realized that this module bad. I had to prevent that module loading. To do so,
nano /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
and add

blacklist zc0301

We need another module at this point, gspca.To load this module debian has an easy and beatiful application module-assistant. Go ahead and install it

apt-get install module-assistant

then to install gspca module

m-a auto-install gspca

That is it. Your webcam should be ready now. To test

apt-get install streamer

then

streamer -t 10 -r 2 -o foobar00.jpeg

should capture ten frames, two per second.

To setup a system that captures images and put them to your webserver you can use webcam software. To install write

apt-get install webcam

After that you should put your config file to /root/.webcamrc.

nano /root/.webcamrc

paste the lines below

[grab]
device = /dev/video0
text = "NSLU2 webcam %Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S (EST)"
# infofile =
fg_red = 255
fg_green = 255
fg_blue = 255
width = 640
height = 480
# delay = number of seconds between snapshots
delay = 30
wait = 1
input = ZC301-2
# norm = webcam
rotate = 0
top = 0
left = 0
bottom = -1
right = -1
quality = 100
trigger = 0
once = 0
# archive =
[ftp]
host = 127.0.0.1
user = root
pass = xxxx
dir = /var/www/webcam
file = webcam.jpeg
tmp = uploading.jpeg
passive = 1
debug = 0
auto = 0
# local = 1 means just use the local directory specified above, do not use ftp or ssh
local = 1
ssh = 0

now if you type

webcam

it should start capturing images and put them to the folder you specified. There is something to mention though

input = ZC301-2

this line is catchy. I guess it differs at different webcams. To learn the correct input name of your device first install v4l-conf

apt-get install v4l-conf

Then,

v4l-info | grep name

should give you the correct name. In my case I got

ioctl VIDIOCGTUNER: Invalid argument
ioctl VIDIOCGAUDIO: Invalid argument
name : "Z-star Vimicro zc0301p"
name : "ZC301-2"

and I used ZC301-2 as the input.Try and see what is yours.
After the setup if you want it to work automatically after restart you can set up a crontab:

crontab -e
@reboot /usr/bin/webcam

I hope this helps someone...