Page 358 - Hacking Roomba
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Chapter 15 — RoombaCam: Adding Eyes to Roomba 339
FIGURE 15-6: Power cable and battery pack in use
Adding a Camera
There are literally hundreds of different models of USB webcams that have been sold over the
years. Unfortunately none of them seem to use the USB video device class, so each webcam
must have a separate driver instead of them all using a general driver. In practice, there are
only a handful companies that make webcam chipsets, turning the problem into writing a
dozen drivers instead of hundreds. In Windows this isn’t as relevant because of the vendor-
supplied drivers (and you hope the vendor continues to release upgrades when the OS is
updated), but in Linux these drivers are written by the community. Because it takes time to figure
out how to talk to a webcam without any documentation and because the webcam maker can
change the internals of the camera without changing the model name, finding a working
webcam under Linux is often hit-or-miss.
