Driver for r5u870 USB webcams

Driver for r5u870 USB webcams

[Jon Mason]

My laptop has the "Ricoh Co., Ltd Visual Communication Camera VGP-VCC7
[R5U870]" webcam.  A quick scan of the kernel does not show the USB ID
listed.  `lsusb` has it listed as:

Bus 001 Device 005: ID 05ca:183a Ricoh Co., Ltd Visual Communication
Camera VGP-VCC7 [R5U870]

I managed to find a Linux driver on the internet at
http://code.google.com/p/r5u870/
The comment on the website seems to imply the driver has been
abandoned by it's original writer.

I am wondering if there are any plans to provide support for this
hardware via extending another driver or if there are any plans to
pull this driver into the kernel.

Thanks,
Jon

Re: Driver for r5u870 USB webcams

[Hans de Goede]

Hi,

On 04/21/2011 03:08 PM, Jon Mason wrote:
> My laptop has the "Ricoh Co., Ltd Visual Communication Camera VGP-VCC7
> [R5U870]" webcam.  A quick scan of the kernel does not show the USB ID
> listed.  `lsusb` has it listed as:
>
> Bus 001 Device 005: ID 05ca:183a Ricoh Co., Ltd Visual Communication
> Camera VGP-VCC7 [R5U870]
>
> I managed to find a Linux driver on the internet at
> http://code.google.com/p/r5u870/
> The comment on the website seems to imply the driver has been
> abandoned by it's original writer.
>
> I am wondering if there are any plans to provide support for this
> hardware via extending another driver or if there are any plans to
> pull this driver into the kernel.

r5u87x based cams work with the regular uvcvideo driver, but first they
need to have firmware loaded into them (at every boot). See here for
the firmware load tool for linux:
https://bitbucket.org/ahixon/r5u87x/wiki/Home

Note chances are this tool is packaged for your distribution, for example
for Fedora it is available in rpmfusion nonfree under the package name
"r5u87x-firmware"

Regards,

Hans