Mightex USB Camera

Just thought I'd share my experiences with the Mightex Systems USB camera that I'm using for my project. There's not a lot of info available on these, at least not the last time I did search. The device I'm using is an 8 bit buffered USB 2.0 camera listed here on Mightex's webiste: http://www.mightexsystems.com/family_info.php?cPath=1_16&categories_id=16

So far their support has been pretty good, every query I've made has been replied to within a day at most and the developers always seem keen help. Unfortunately while I was able to get the Windows drivers and applications to work straight up, the Linux drivers needed some modifications to compile. Luckily the source code was included so I was able to do the modifications and provide the developers with my .diff file.

The issue with the drivers is that they were originally written for and tested with Fedora Core 5, which is based on an earlier version of the 2.6 kernel than the Ubuntu 9.04 I'm using now. The Video4Linux library has since undergone some changes but the driver was not updated to follow suit. This unfortunately leads to compilation errors as the Mightex driver tries to reference some deprecated functions. Luckily the changes were relatively minor as the functions still exist, they've just been moved to different locations and so the new relevant header files have to be included. If you're really interested let me know and I can provide the .diff file to patch your driver.

After fixing that up I was able to compile the included application to test the camera. Quality is pretty good, and I'm getting a steady 25 fps at 1280 x 1024 resolution. Right now I'm trying to get it working with my OpenCV program so stay tuned for more info.