Installing a Pixart Imaging, CIF Single Chip Webcam

Summer, 2008
Blissfully unaware about Hardware Compatibility Lists in driver pages, i finally got myself a USB web cam. It was this little thing i thought would work without hassle. >>

Looks like i was wrong. A `lsusb` output on my Debian GNU/Linux box and this was what i got :

$lsusb
093a:2460 Pixart Imaging, CIF Single Chip

Looking all good, i headed down to Google to search for the vendor ID. I ended up with this (http://mxhaard.free.fr/download.html) page and found out that my cam was supported by the spca5xx drivers. Downloaded the tarball from the same site, wasted a couple of hours downloading hell lot of dependencies for the compilation and finally it compiled. ;)

It just didn't work no matter what. The cam was sitting there literally for months together until i found another blog deeply hidden in Google in which the guy had the same problem as mine and thank heavens he had a workaround too.

So this is what i had to do :

$ cd /path/to/the/tarball/
$ tar xvf gspcav1-20071224.tar.gz
$ cd gspca/modules/gspca/Pixart/

Once there, you need to edit a file called pac207.h
In Line 137, replace if(id[0]!=0x27) with if(id[0]!=0x27 || id[1]!=0x08)
So you'll end up with this :

....
PDEBUG(2, " Pixart Sensor ID 0x%02X Chips ID 0x%02X !!\n", id[0],
id[1]);
if(id[0]!=0x27 || id[1]!=0x08)
return -ENODEV;

return 0;
....

Well, that's pretty much it. Just save the file, close and rebuild it with "make" and "make install" as root.
Plug in the cam and you'll see some messages appear in `dmesg | tail` if your webcam was successfully detected and gspca driver was loaded right and yes the cam was working!

P.S : If your kernel doesn't auto-load modules, just do a modprobe gspca