NetDrive HP C200 Plugin: Blueprint Software Works


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	About the NetDrive HP C200 Plugin

What is HP C200 ? HP C200 is a digital photo camera fully named Hewlett-Packard PhotoSmart C200 digital camera. This camera is low cost solution for digital home photography. It also has enough resolution and can be useful for creating Web-pictures.

Introduction. If you are an owner of this camera you have the standard software provided with the device. You can argue, but in my opinion this software is quite ugly. It has a low pictures transfer speed and rather high resources requirements. And this software also has one important drawback - it's for Windows. I tried to find something for OS/2, but had no success. I found DCITU utility by Stephane Charette, but it didn't support HP cameras, and the author didn't promise to do that in the near future (frankly speaking, there is one program - the port of Linux gPhoto, but it requires XFree86). It's the prelude, the plot is - I've written my own software.

What is HP C200 plugin ? HP C200 plugin is a dynamic loadable library for digital photo-camera link and pictures access protocols. It allows you, by using standard OS/2 techniques like copying files from the command line, drag and drop by mice :-), copy taken photos from your HP C200 digital camera to your PC equipped with OS/2 and NetDrive with this plugin. It doesn't require additional knowledge about specific digital camera software commands. As far as I know, HP C200 cameras and some previous models of HP's digital camera, like C20, C30 (and some Konica's ones) have the same serial link protocol. But I've got C200, so I have no opportunity to check up my program with these devices. Let me know if you will have.

What can and can't the HP C200 plugin do ? HP C200 plugin allows you to perform almost all file operations possible in OS/2 - copying, moving, deleting files from your digital camera. Plugin doesn't support reconnect at all, but it's very easy to reconnect with NetDrive commands. Plugin doesn't perform any conversions. You'll just get your pictures in jpeg format on your PC. Than you'll be able to see and transform them (for example with PMView) as you wish.

How to install ? Plugin installation is very easy with the new NetDrive 2.0 version. HP C200 plugin is contained in one archive ndphpc.zip. You have to unzip it into an empty directory. Then run instpl.cmd from the directory. You do not have to reboot the system.

How to work with HP C200 plugin ? Connect your camera to PC with serial link cable provided in the camera package. Switch on your camera first, i.e. open the blind on the objective (consult camera user's manual). Mount the camera resource. There is a sample command file for mounting HP C200 - hpcmount.cmd.

nd attach u:

nd createmp u:\MyCamera

nd mount hpc200 u:\MyCamera HPCCOM=com1;HPCBAUD=115200 w

First line - create a new NetDrive drive letter.

Second line - create the mount point for mounting the HP C200 resource.

Third line - mount resource into the created mount point. There are two parameters for the HP C200 plugin.

HPCCOM - the name of the serial port to communicate to your camera. It can be either - com1, com2... etc. Default serial port name is com1.

HPCBAUD - the baud rate to communicate to your camera. Consult camera's users manual to be aware about available speed for your device. Default serial port speed is 115200.

After mounting, you may go to the NetDrive drive. When you open MyCamera folder you will see files with names DSCXXXXX.JPG and TMNXXXXX.JPG. Group of files with names begin with DSC is your photos. Group of files with names begin with TMN is thumbnails for that pictures. Thus you can copy and look through the thumbnails and than copy the pictures you pleased. Don't forget - you can't delete thumbnails, they will be deleted when you delete corresponding pictures.

If your camera went to sleep or "hangs" you should reset it (close the blind and after a short delay open it again) and invoke command file - hpcreconnect.cmd. Communication will be restored. If you want to finish work with HP C200, you should unmount the resource :

nd unmount u:\MyCamera 0

Latest version of the plugin can be found at my ftp site ftp://cbs-edu.chel.su/pub/Porro/HP_C200 .

If you have bug report or suggestions, you are welcome :-)

Credits :

Markus Demleitner (msdemlei@tucana.harvard.edu)

Konica corporation (qm200-support@konica.co.jp)

Phill Hugo the author of Konica QM100 Digital Still Camera Utility for GNU/Linux