I have a project which requires building a robot that is going to transmit video data wireless. After some exploration, I came across with Lantronix’s WiPort. After looking to the posts on this forum, I see that a lot of people are talking about this device. I immediately registered:) Anyway, here is the problem I am facing right now:
The plan is to use a cheap USB webcam and interface it to WiPort somehow. I am hoping to achieve ‘plug an play’ connectivity, such that when a connection is established with the Wiport, Windows will detect and recognize the webcam as a USB device. Do you think if this is possible? If I could achieve this then I could directly start capturing frames either using DirectShow or other webcam libraries. I know that I can use COM Port Redirector which comes with the Wiport. However, I need to somehow convert the COM port to USB, so that Windows can detect the webcam as a USB device. At least this is what I am hoping. Do you think that this kind of approach is feasible? Any suggestions and directions are greatly appreciated. Thank in advance.
what you are describing is a wireless USB device server. most of these you might see for sale are ok for printers but can’t handle the bandwidth of a video connection. a couple of months ago I paired a lantronix ubox2100 with a d-link wireless access point configured as a client. after loading the driver on my PC it will find a microsoft vx3000 webcam plugged into the ubox.
I don’t think there is anything special about the wap I used, basically anything that would let a PC with an ethernet port make a wireless connection should work. if I ever get to see daiylight again from work projects I want to get a real cheap one like you would use on an xbox to connect it to the internet via WLAN.
Thanks for the reply EddieB. The robot that I am building has space restrictions. Thus I am creating my own PCB design which contains a USB to ethernet converter. Then I will plug chip’s output to the ethernet input of the Wiport. However, my concern is whether windows is going to recognize the USB camera or not, as a USB device, because it is not connected physically to the PC. Do you think there is a possibility that camera is going to be detected by windows automatically? Or, do I need to write a driver code or something like that to communicate via TCP/IP to Wiport to grab images from the camera? It would be so much easier if windows could detect the camera, so that I could use standart libraries to capture frames.
This is a little different than what I thought I understood your orriginal post to be describing. Adding the WiPort in the manner you describe should be roughly the same as adding any wireless access point configured as a client to the ethernet output of your converter, or even just plugging it directly into a wired hub on your network for developing and test.
Please understand that the WiPort drivers on the PC present it as two (2)serial port (COM) devices, nothing else. If you use the ethernet port on the WiPort (this works only on the later b/g models I believe) then your device appears as any other network attached device and would require the same driver support as though it were plugged into any other wired or wireless hub. The WiPort itself has GPIO pins that can be accessed using a UDP port, and they “could” be exposed as some sort of Windows device if someone were to write a driver.
There is a product out there, it’s name escapes me but perhaps someone else on the forum will recall, that compresses video, sends it over a RS-232 serial port, then has an application on the PC to reconstruct it. Something like this could use the high speed serial ports on the WiPort transparently. I believe the video input was a standard composite or s-video signals though, not USB.
