!!!IMPORTANT!!! It has come to my attention that the PTZ controls are exposed in the V4L2 interface. Some say that they have been able to control via the OBS programs. Thanx to: Thomas Canning and Eric Betts for pointing this out to me. :) Therefore I dont think the reverse engineering approach, used here, is "the way to go" to be able to control the camera. !!!IMPORTANT!!! This is a research project where I have been trying to figure out how to operate the Obsbot-Tiny camera from Linux. https://www.obsbot.com/obsbot-tiny My intention is to share this code in the hopes of triggering people more gifted than I, and thereby helping a Linux driver be developed for the device. Some disassembly has revealed that the camera is based on the HiSilicon Hi3516CV500 One of the testpads seem to output serial 115200,8,N,1 serial. But I have not seen any u-boot. The chip seems capable of running the AI part on the device. The camera seems to be running without step-motors and it seems to have feedback, so it knows where the camera is pointing. On curious note. When I did the traffic captures I used a laptop, as my main PC is virtualized and cant run virtualbox. On that laptop the device popped up as two devices. (lsusb) #Bus 001 Device 004: ID 13d3:56f9 IMC Networks OBSBOT Tiny #Bus 001 Device 005: ID 6e30:fef0 Remo Tech Co., Ltd. OBSBOT Tiny And on my regular virtualized Ubuntu with an usb controller passed through, it reveals itself like this. #Bus 009 Device 002: ID 6e30:fef0 I suspect that the laptop use USB3.0 and the device behaves differently on USB2.0 and 3.0 busses. Beware this is work in progress and is currently very limited in functionality. Demo can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2n7L8eY6U8 Features above the line are supported. Things below are todo. *) PTZ movement left, right, up, down and stop. (replay of commands) *) go to home ----------------------------- *) Understand PTZ commands *) Fine grained camera control *) Read current position, zoom etx *) Start/stop AI (I suspect the HiSilicon is doing the AI) *) Zoom *) Ability to use camera while controlling *) Figure out to fetch images or use alongside webcam app. The current functionality is achieved based on USB traffic captured from a virtual machine with the USB camera connected via passthrough. These commands are essentially just replayed. The replay of commands reveal some "fun" behaviour, as left, right, up and down commands are replayed commands that probably is not lean move commands. Understanding of the protocol is needed. The communication between the device and host also includes read commands, and this protocol also needs to be understood. Hopefully it would contain current settings. #The capture process I have used Virtualbox installed on an Ubuntu 20.04. The virtualbox machine is running Windows 10 and the official utility for windows is used. The capture process used was the following. 1) Identify the device using lsusb (6e30:fef0) #lsusb Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub Bus 003 Device 002: ID 1358:c123 Realtek Bluetooth Radio Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub Bus 001 Device 004: ID 13d3:56f9 IMC Networks OBSBOT Tiny Bus 001 Device 003: ID 27c6:5110 Shenzhen Goodix Technology Co.,Ltd. Bus 001 Device 002: ID 05e3:0610 Genesys Logic, Inc. 4-port hub Bus 001 Device 005: ID 6e30:fef0 Remo Tech Co., Ltd. OBSBOT Tiny Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub 2) Identify the UUID of the device in this list (6e30:fef0 -> eb48482b-cba1-4c69-b920-bb4f5a44b128) #VBoxManage list usbhost Host USB Devices: UUID: eb48482b-cba1-4c69-b920-bb4f5a44b128 VendorId: 0x6e30 (6E30) ProductId: 0xfef0 (FEF0) Revision: 4.9 (0409) Port: 1 USB version/speed: 2/High Manufacturer: Remo Tech Co., Ltd. Product: OBSBOT Tiny Address: sysfs:/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:08.1/0000:03:00.3/usb1/1-2//device:/dev/vboxusb/001/005 Current State: Busy 3) Start a virtualbox with windows 10 and the obsbot software (note the vm name) 4) enable usb monitoring on the Ubuntu machine (replace your username) #sudo modprobe usbmon #sudo setfacl -m u:USER_NAME:r /dev/usbmon* 5) open Wireshark and capture from the first usbmon device 6) Passthrough the device to the virtual windows machine #VBoxManage controlvm Win10_obsbot usbattach eb48482b-cba1-4c69-b920-bb4f5a44b128 *Notice that the VBoxManage command can take a capturefile argument. I used this method initially, but I was unable to parse these files with the usbrply tool. 7) Exercise the camera. To record commands. 8) Disconnect the camera #VBoxManage controlvm Win10_obsbot usbdetach 26e812f4-663d-41d9-9d5c-f772584a981f 9) Save the capture as .pcapng 10) The capture can be converted into libusb commands using (https://github.com/JohnDMcMaster/usbrply.git inside a docker environment) #make replay.py *I ended up using a docker environment for the replay as the project was picky about python versions and other dependencies. 11) replay.py contains the sequence of commands *Notice you have to edit the camera VID and PID before running *I had to detach the driver on the device to be allowed to write to the device if dev.kernelDriverActive(0): print("detaching", 0) dev.detachKernelDriver(0) *when running, some commands result in error. Try uncommenting and also reduce largest sleeps to speed up things *When the commands can be sent a replay can be seen. 12) Commands can be lifted from this replay file to identify camera commands. Finally the working commands can be lifted into another context where they can be used. I use PyGame as i find it an easy tool for interaction and visual feedback. Beware there is no image yet. #sudo ./tiny.py