So I picked up a cheap PTZ (pan/tilt/zoom) camera off eBay a couple weeks ago for doing some R&D on a project I'm working on. My hope was I'd be able to hook it up and talk to it from a device and get streaming video into an app. Well it turns out that it's not so simple. All cameras appear to have some form of proprietary interface that obviously varies from OEM to OEM.
I hooked up WireShark in hopes that I could reverse engineer the network commands fromthe packets, but it looks like it would take me weeks to get it figured out, and I don't have that kind of time (or desire) so I shot off an email to the OEM. While I wait for them to reply (if they ever do) I went about reverse-engineering a kludge.
The device has a built in web server that allows you to control the camera, view video, etc. So I opened up a page and looked at the source. It contained a frameset, so I started navigating through frame pages and deconstructing the html to see what commands did what. Unfortunately the video streaming piece appears to be in a compiled Java applet so getting at that turned out to be a dead-end, however it wasn't a total loss. I did figure out how to send it commands to pan, tilt and capture single frames (well I figured out a lot more, but I limited my implementation to those functions for now).
So armed with what I knew, I slapped together the following class, basically simulating myself as a browser:
using System;
using System.Net;
using System.Net.Sockets;
using System.Drawing;
using System.IO;
using System.Threading;
using OpenNETCF.Peripherals.Camera;
namespace OpenNETCF.Peripherals
{
public class MegaTecCamera : ICamera
{
private const int CMD_UP = 1;
private const int CMD_DOWN = 2;
private const int CMD_LEFT = 3;
private const int CMD_RIGHT = 4;
private string m_ip;
private string m_username;
private string m_password;
public MegaTecCamera(IPAddress address, string username, string password)
{
m_ip = address.ToString();
m_username = username;
m_password = password;
}
public Image GetImage()
{
Image img = null;
string command = string.Format(http://{0}/pda.cgi?user={1}&password={2}&page=image&cam=1,
m_ip, m_username, m_password);
byte[] buffer = new byte[10000];
HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(command);
HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();
using (Stream stream = response.GetResponseStream())
{
try
{
img = new Bitmap(stream);
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine("Capture failed: " + ex.Message);
}
response.Close();
}
return img;
}
public void Pan(PanDirection direction)
{
if (direction == PanDirection.Left)
SendHttpCommand(GetDirectionCommand(CMD_LEFT));
else
SendHttpCommand(GetDirectionCommand(CMD_RIGHT));
}
public void Tilt(TiltDirection direction)
{
if (direction == TiltDirection.Up)
SendHttpCommand(GetDirectionCommand(CMD_UP));
else
SendHttpCommand(GetDirectionCommand(CMD_DOWN));
}
private string GetDirectionCommand(int direction)
{
return string.Format(http://{0}/pda.cgi?user={1}&password={2}&page=execute&cam=1&command={3},
m_ip, m_username, m_password, direction);
}
private void SendHttpCommand(string command)
{
ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem(new WaitCallback(delegate(object o)
{
HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(command);
try
{
request.GetResponse().Close();
}
catch { }
}));
}
}
}
The next obvious question is "What the hell do I do with this class that is of any use?"
Well that's the fun part! I integrated it into a sample page on our demo Padarn server, so we now have images captured from an IP camera streamed back to a 200MHz Windows CE device that in turn serves up those images (and control of the camera) using an ASP.NET server.
The next step I'll add is the ability to turn on and off the light in the room via a web page.