Hi. I’ve successfully used a BB xM with an LI-5M03 pretty extensively. At the time, I was using an Ubuntu 12.04 filesystem and the Ubuntu 12.04 kernel (3.2.x-based) which I patched with a few things I found on the net, plus some of my own changes to the MT9P031 sensor driver. I haven’t gotten around to updating to a newer kernel, but that’s on my list.
As I recall, I had to skip the first 3 or so images every time I started streaming - that got rid of a lot of funny color/etc. problems. It’d be nice to have a proper solution for that. The linux video folks may be able to help, but I need to get caught up to the current driver versions and figure out if it’s still happening there.
Because of the I/O voltage levels on the BB xM, the sensor has to be run at half the max clock speed it can handle, so at full resolution (5 MP) the best you can do is a hair under 7 fps. I’ve run the same cameras on a Leopardboard at full speed, but the LB’s poor little processor and bus can’t come close to handling that much data, which is part of why we switched to the BB xM. One fellow told me that he had successfully run the camera at full speed anyway (by patching the driver to set the clock/PLL to that speed, despite being out of spec to run at that speed at the I/O voltage on the BB xM), so I also plan to give that a try, since we could really use the higher speed.
I also want to try again to find a way to run at 1 GHz. With that same kernel, they’ve run reliably at 800 MHz, but again a bit more speed would be nice.
Robert Nelson seems to be a good source of info on the current state of things. When I get time to get back to this, perhaps in the next couple of weeks, I plan to see where his kernels are at by then, and the state of the MT9P031 driver (and 1 GHz support) in those kernels, and likely start from there, probably with an Ubuntu 13.04 filesystem.
Cheers,
Chris MacGregor