Exploring My Computer

[Moorzee]

Hi folks

I am trying to interface with a digital camera and was thinking of approaching the problem like so:

Load form and explore My Computer until I find a drive where type is like "Camera"(I've plugged my digi camera in and when I go in to explore I see the camera below network drives in a section named Scanners and Cameras.

My problem is I cannot find the camera. I use My.Computer.Drives but this only returns C:\ , Dvd drive, and my iPod...

Does anyone know how I can locate my camera?

Cheers in advance of any help you can throw my way.

 

[JohnH]

If it's showing outside the Explorers 'My Computer' scope I think it's only recognized as an imaging/camera device and not a 'smart-drive', so it can be used as live webcam but not a removable drive. There could be a driver for the camera that haven't been installed, some such devices need a specific driver, but not necessarily - not all such devices can be accessed for direct file operations. You should check the product specs/docs/web, else (without a drive letter to it) I think you're out of luck.

 

[Moorzee]

Are you aware of any way I could access/interogate the USB port that the camera is plugged into?

Cheers.

 

[JohnH]

You should first try to find driver that will enable as drive from those who made the camera, but yes, there exist a free .Net wrapper for a USB library here http://www.icsharpcode.net/opensource/sharpusblib/ I think it is fairly advanced. Here is the forum http://icsharpcode.net/OpenSource/SD/Forum/forum.asp?FORUM_ID=30 Search the web and try to find examples also.

 

[Moorzee]

Finding & installing the actual drivers would be preferable I understand, but my app is to be run on many different machines with different cameras and I could not be certain that the users will have the specific drivers installed correctly. It looks like I need to purchase some component for messing about with image devices TWAIN etc...

Cheers John.

 

[JohnH]

Do you actually mean to access the camera to get files of images taken earlier or to use it as a live webcam? In the first case, as discussed above, you will run into problems to access many different unknown devices, even those accessible as a drive will only identify as 'removable', which could be a lot of different equipment for same system at the same time.

 

[Moorzee]

I wanted to access the cameras memory and retrieve the images taken on it, sort of image archive system for our organisation. I have just downloaded LEAD technologies eval suite so will have a bash at that.