[libcamera-devel] [PATCH 0/7] libcamera: Allow for user-friendly names in applications

[Niklas Söderlund]

Hello,

With the recent change where the camera names where remade into a camera 
id to better model it's original intent it have become necessary to 
advance the topic of user-friendly names in applications. This series is 
an attempt to do so.

Patch 1/7 adds a new camera property 'Model' that may be used to record 
a cameras model. Patch 2/7, 3/7  and 4/7 then implements this new 
property for all pipeline handlers.

Patch 5/7 fix a left over bug in the cam utility since the 
transformation of Camera::name() to Camera::id(). Patch 6/7 introduce 
user-friendly names to the cam utility.

The final patch 7/7 records the model information in the DNG files 
created by qcam. More work is needed on top of this series to create 
user-friendly names for qcam. My intention is to do this in a follow up 
series once this is merged as I fear some bikeshedding on the style of 
the user-friendly name so lets battle that out in cam first :-)

This series depends on [1].

Example of listing cameras with and without this series,

Without:
    $ cam -l
    Available cameras:
    1: \_SB_.PCI0.RP05.PXSX-2.1.1:1.0-0ac8:3420
    2: \_SB_.PCI0.RP05.PXSX-2.4:1.0-046d:0843
    3: platform/vimc.0 Sensor B

    $ cam -l
    Available cameras:
    1: \_SB_.PCI0.I2C2.CAM0
    2: \_SB_.PCI0.I2C4.CAM1

With:
    $ cam -l
    Available cameras:
    1: Venus USB2.0 Camera: Venus USB2 with id \_SB_.PCI0.RP05.PXSX-2.1.1:1.0-0ac8:3420
    2: Logitech Webcam C930e with id \_SB_.PCI0.RP05.PXSX-2.4:1.0-046d:0843
    3: Sensor B facing front rotated 0 degrees with id platform/vimc.0 Sensor B

    $ cam -l
    Available cameras:
    1: ov13858 facing front rotated 0 degrees with id \_SB_.PCI0.I2C2.CAM0
    2: ov5670 facing front rotated 0 degrees with id \_SB_.PCI0.I2C4.CAM1

It can be observed above that all Cameras that report the Location and 
Rotation properties do so by stating they face the front and are not 
rotated. We know this is not true for some devices. This is however not 
a fault of this series as it only prints what is reported by the Camera.
Once we teach the Camera to report true values for these properties cam 
will print the correct information.

1. [PATCH 0/3] libcamera: Mark controls and property accessors as const 
   operations

Niklas Söderlund (7):
  libcamera: properties: Add model property
  libcamera: camera_sensor: Set sensor model property
  libcamera: pipeline: uvcvideo: Initialize CameraData from MediaDevice
  libcamera: pipeline: uvcvideo: Set sensor model property
  cam: Rename cameraName variable
  cam: Print user-friendly camera names
  qcam: dng_writer: Record camera model

 src/cam/main.cpp                             | 47 +++++++++++++++++---
 src/libcamera/camera_sensor.cpp              |  2 +
 src/libcamera/pipeline/uvcvideo/uvcvideo.cpp | 34 +++++++-------
 src/libcamera/property_ids.yaml              |  5 +++
 src/qcam/dng_writer.cpp                      | 13 ++++--
 5 files changed, 76 insertions(+), 25 deletions(-)

-- 
2.28.0