Introduction

Intended to be used on board, I 'acquired' two weeCam parallel port webcams for a very reasonable price. In hindsight, almost any other camera would have been better, and as I already told the many people who have been asking for this documentation:

If you can afford it, buy another camera. The lens is of very bad quality (plastic, 10 % distorsion), the hardware/firmware is not reliable (even the original Alaris Windows drivers hang frequently on a 1 GHz machine), and the firmware is badly designed - no access to the full resolution of the sensor, for example. Suspicious hardware design too: it's got 8Mb of RAM on board, of which it only uses maybe 100 kB. It's no wonder these cams were given away for free to new Sprint subscribers. I had much better results with the Creative Webcam II, parallel port version (lent to me), for which drivers are already on the net (the protocol CPiA is documented).

It was quite an adventure to get the cam working - not only under Windows, but particulary under Linux. I've dedicated several pages to the process of extracting the information.