Can the FX2 communicate with a webcam?

Tip / Sign in to post questions, reply, level up, and achieve exciting badges. Know more

cross mob
Anonymous
Not applicable
        Hello,   
   
I am working on a project involving an Avnet Virtex-5 board with a Cypress FX2 USB controller. I'm trying to find out if it's possible to rewrite the firmware of the FX2 in order to communicate with a webcam (so another "device") and request a videostream in isochronous transfer mode.   
I'm not looking for complete host functionality, just a simple way to make the FX2 ask for the videostream from the webcam and deliver it to my FPGA for processing. Is this feasible? If so, could you point me towards any documentation that might help me?   
Besides this, since the board is normally behaving as a "device", and the connector is type B, do you know if the usb connector will deliver power to the webcam?   
   
Thank you,   
Christian   
0 Likes
3 Replies
Anonymous
Not applicable
        FX2LP is high speed peripheral device. It does not have the required hardware to support as a host. So it is not possible to request data from webcam through the usb port.   
   
Regards,   
Gopal   
0 Likes
Anonymous
Not applicable
        Thank you for your input, I see there's no way around this and I can't make the 2 devices communicate. Therefore I decided to use a PC in between. I'm getting the videostream from the usb webcam using a C# simple application and I want to send it to my FPGA board with FX2 chip.   
Unfortunately I got stuck when trying to send the data over to the FX2. I looked over the docs about FX2 firmware, also analysed the Screamer application provided in the developer's kit, but I still cannot figure out how to send the data.. actually how to talk to the driver (cyusb.sys). Do you have any other example or info which could help me out?   
   
Thanks,   
Christian   
0 Likes
Anonymous
Not applicable
        I spent some more time reading the documentation for CyUSB.NET. As I see, I can use the class CyIsocEndPoint and maybe the XferData member (which sends or receives x bytes from a specified buffer) to initiate and complete a transfer. Now, I can't figure out how to send the constant stream captured from the webcam using DirectShow.   
I do not know if this is possible, or how I can use this buffer to store stream and forward it to the Cypress device.   
I would appreciate any code, pseudo-code or explanation which can do this (either completely redirect the stream to the cypress device, or use 2 alternative buffers to store it and send it at certain time intervals).   
I believe there is an easy way to do it but C# is not my strongpoint.   
   
Thank you,   
Christian   
0 Likes