Logitech Quickcam PTZ Motion Control

Forum for questions and support relating to the 1.28.x releases only.
Locked
joshua
Posts: 2
Joined: Wed Feb 17, 2016 3:47 am

Logitech Quickcam PTZ Motion Control

Post by joshua »

I'm trying to get the pan/tilt feature of my old USB webcam to work with the ZoneMinder web interface. As far as I can tell, image and video capture work "out of the box" otherwise.

My first steps were to adapt these instructions:
https://wiki.zoneminder.com/Debian_8.1_ ... e_Easy_Way

viewtopic.php?t=9788

So I have ZoneMinder 1.28 from Jessie Backports installed on a headless Debian i386 system (an old Asus EEE PC Netbook). I set up the built-in webcam and the Logitech USB Quickcam in monitor mode without issue.

The only change I made to the control script was to remove the inclusion of ZoneMinder::debug. I'm not completely sure it uses the the same chipset as the Orbit/Sphere cameras discussed in the second post, though.

lsusb shows:
lsusb -s 022 -v | grep id
idVendor 0x046d Logitech, Inc.
idProduct 0x08c2 QuickCam PTZ

As far as errors, the only hints I have are:
- this file doesn't exist:
/sys/class/video4linux/videoX/pan_tilt
So I've also tried /dev/mediaX (with the correct digit in place of X) and any other files I came across as possibilities for the control device setting.

- the camera works fine on a different computer using guvcview (motion control and all). My target system does not have an OS GUI.

- the tool uvcdynctrl indicates the camera supports pan and tilt but using get and set with the tool gives errors.

- tried to run motion commands from CLI with no useful feedback (sudo /usr/bin/zmcontrol.pl --id 4 --command=moveRelLeft --panspeed=1 --panstep=200) and I've run the script itself (sudo perl Pwc.pm) without error.
joshua
Posts: 2
Joined: Wed Feb 17, 2016 3:47 am

Re: Logitech Quickcam PTZ Motion Control

Post by joshua »

It's been a while and I haven't made any progress. It seems like I should be able to draw some hints about how the PTZ functions work from the guvcview application, but I can't find any good resources about how that software works. At first, I thought the missing file at /sys/class/video4linux/videoX/pan_tilt should be a good place to start tinkering, but neither system, my desktop with a GUI or the target Netbook, create the file after connecting the webcam. So clearly it's not necessary for using guvcview, right? Is there any other place I can look for troubleshooting info?
JTheDoc
Posts: 11
Joined: Sun Aug 28, 2016 8:08 pm

Re: Logitech Quickcam PTZ Motion Control

Post by JTheDoc »

I've been attempting for the last year to get PTZ to work with the Orbit AF. It's been driving me nuts.
I have set up scripts to run that send "Pan (Relative)/Tilt (Relative)" commands when motion is detected (when a certain camera, or itself creates an alarm). I have it look around to cover areas I can't see. But if it's on demand, and I want to look around at someone dealing drugs, or breaking into my home like last time, I have to use the "force alarm" command, and hope it happens to capture them for me to see... Kind of annoying, and I don't have the resources to buy an actual PTZ cam when the Orbit AF is fantastic, and when weatherproofed like mine, has lasted over a year.

Have you had luck with controlling the PTZ within the monitor? And if so, any luck since asking the question as to whether you have motion detection/follow working?

Would be a great help, asked a few times, even on old posts that once had it working, but the forum is kinda dead on this subject. Cheers!
Locked