Derek Tombrello - 2017-08-05

I have been, successfully, using a generic endoscope with OctoPrint as a webcam. The quality sucked, so I decided to try a new camera. I saw three versions of the Creative Live! cam in the wiki here - Webcams known to work · foosel/OctoPrint Wiki · GitHub - so I bought a cheap Creative Live! Netbook cam from Amazon. After a bit of fiddling, I am finally able to access the camera through OctoPrint, but the image flickers kind of like a scrambled cable channel back in the old days of converter boxes. I have played with the settings in boot.txt, trying [-y] - which did not work at all; [-r VGA, 640x480 and 320x200]; [-f 10 and 5]; and even [-q 75]... nothing made a difference. I even tried playing with the v4l2-ctl settings and none of those helped, either. I have found that in very low light conditions, the image will stabilize and stop flickering, but then you can barely see the buildplate. As soon as I illuminate the surface - bam! scrambled flickering. I thought maybe automatic gain control, but that was one of the things in v4l2 that I tried turning off with no success. I thought that changing the aspect ratio to 4:3 from the default 16:9 had fixed it, but again, illuminating the plate scrambles the image.

This uses mpeg-streamer and when I navigate to the pi_IP/webcam/stream.html I get the same flickering image.

After not getting any replies on the OctoPrint Forum, I swapped a friend this Creative Live! camera for an older Logitech C120 that he had. Again, it works perfectly on both linux systems, but has the same flicker on OctoPrint as the Creative camera. This animated GIF that I made of screenshots shows what the camera is doing. I would REALLY appreciate any help on this.