I finally got BBB and LCD7 running with the radiumboard HD Camera Cape, using the Angstrom image on the camera CDROM, BB-BONE-CAM-VVDN_CR4.img
Also I read the LCD7 reference manual and looked here http://elinux.org/CircuitCo:BeagleBone_LCD7
radium boards provides a source folder on CDROM but it is an entire Linux 3.8.13 kernel with no documents… I just would like the camera support files.
The Angstrom image and the Cheese camera app (why is it called Cheese? “say cheese” before you take a photo?) has several bugs: trying to take a video locks up Cheese.
I can’t run the screen calibration again. It starts to load then nothing.
The touchscreen (used with stylus) is so jittery it’s almost useless.
If I try to set the time with the clock widget it crashes.
Is there any support for using the camera in Ubuntu or in any way other than with Cheese? Not that I can find unless I want to write all my own support from scratch. Section 2.9 of the camera reference manual has this:
Software/Hardware Interface/Ports Software Interface: SW interface is via Linux-V4L2 layer. Cape board driver is compactable to V4l2
That’s it. One sentence. Nothing else about a provided driver or how to use the camera with my own application. Nothing about even where to start with some sample camera driver code. I am trying to contact radiumboards about this: there is no support forum at their web site.
LCD7 appears also to have only support on Angstrom?
If I try to run Ubuntu (from eMMC, instead of the uSD card needed for Angstrom with LCD7 and camera) now all I get is errors in the serial monitor:
U-Boot SPL 2015.07-rc3-00001-g2c9c20a (Jun 30 2015 - 09:02:07) spl_register_fat_device: fat register err - -1 spl_register_fat_device: fat register err - -1 spl_load_image_fat: error reading image u-boot.img, err - -1 spl: ext4fs_open failed spl: ext4fs_open failed spl_load_image_ext: error reading image uImage, err - -1 spl: ext4fs_open failed spl_load_image_ext: error reading image u-boot.img, err - -1 spl: mmc: no boot mode left to try ### ERROR ### Please RESET the board ###
resetting the board just gets the same thing. So booting from the uSD has apparently killed the Ubuntu eMMC image, or at least some of its files?
I’m googling around and found this: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/beagleboard/xyT84cDwEsQ where the author spent 10 hours figuring out how to get LCD7 to work with Ubuntu. I’ll try this next. There seems not to be any LCD7-specific support channel.
My hope was to be able to use LCD7 as a local screen and write a simple GUI with some custom buttons to start and stop some attached equipment, read I2C sensors, etc. I don’t want a whole desktop GUI and the overhead of that. I was hoping to write a Python app to build some screens (I think there are some python UI toolkits out there) and expecting the LCD7 and camera would have something like a driver template which I could use as a starting point. But so far I don’t see anything like that.
Am I looking in the wrong place? Wishing for something not there? Are LCD7 and the HD camera cape meant to be just demo items not intended for use in my own applications? Should I be asking these questions elsewhere?
Thanks in advance for anything helpful,
Bruce