Sunday, October 05, 2008

m5602 - gspca conversion complete; driver submitted mainline (almost)

The gspca conversion is complete and went more smoothly than I ever imagined.
I'm still not 100% comfortable with the gspca framwork, but I have submitted some patches against some of the difficulties I've found.

The driver has also been merged in the the official v4l-dvb tree. This means that when Linus Torvalds opens his two week window for new kernel features in what's going to be the 2.6.28 tree, the m5602 driver is going in with it!

What's now bothering me is that I need something new to do with my time, there's still going to be regressions to the driver and some new unsupported sensors may pop up. Also there's a lot of unimplemented features in the m5602, but without any datasheets this is a lot of hard work.

I have a really old webcam at home, the quickcam web. There's currently an old v4l1 bitrotted driver out of the main kernel tree.
Currently I'm investigating if a gspca port is possible and worth the time.