Monthly Archives: April 2012

Microsoft Lifecam Cinema Planetary Camera Mod

Thanks to the cloud rolling in rather early last night I decided to do the conversion of my Lifecam Cinema for astro use. I was intended to fit it into a Billetparts adapter, but they’re out of stock and I … Continue reading

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Chrooted SFTP for Linux

I had a few problems recently when I was trying to set up chrooted SFTP for a single user on a CentOS6 server. Whichever set of instructions I followed, I couldn’t get it to work for me. Eventually, combining information … Continue reading

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Xbox Skycam Falls at the Final Hurdle

I’ve been experimenting this evening with different lenses in the Xbox webcam. It looks like with a wide-angle lens with a field of view of 160 to 170 degrees the stars just don’t put enough light onto the sensor to … Continue reading

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qastrocam-g2 — Astro Image Capture for Linux

Today, pretty much by accident, I stumbled over qastrocam-g2. It’s an astro-imaging capture application for Linux. Thus far I’ve been muddling through with SharpCap, which is absolutely no criticism of that application at all. I just really can’t get on … Continue reading

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Xbox Live Camera on Linux (Part 5)

A brief gap in the clouds this evening gave me a window of about five minutes to test out a couple of Xbox cameras under a night-time sky. I took 30 frames of five seconds each, ten seconds apart. Here … Continue reading

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Xbox Live Camera on Linux (Part 4)

The promised instructions on rebuilding the kernel UVC kernel module. Here’s what I did on my Ubuntu 11.10 Aspire 1. If you substitute in your own kernel version number then you should be ok if you’re running other releases. I … Continue reading

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Xbox Live Camera on Linux (Part 3)

It seems I made an error in my initial attempt to get the exposure settings working for this camera in the uvcvideo driver. The camera appears to accept a far greater range of settings for exposure than I initially thought. … Continue reading

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Xbox Live Camera on Linux (Part 2)

Last night I discovered that I wasn’t able to change the gain setting on the camera using the V4L2 API. No matter what setting I used all my captures turned out the same, using what I presume to be the … Continue reading

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Kernel Patch for Xbox Live Camera on Linux

I’ve done some more work on getting the Xbox Live camera to work properly on Linux this evening and have submitted a patch to the development mailing list. I don’t know if it will get included in some future driver … Continue reading

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SPC900 Camera on Linux

Because of the problems I’ve been having with the Xbox Live camera with my SheevaPlug I decided to give one of my SPC900 cameras a try. I don’t really want to use these as I had another purpose in mind, … Continue reading

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