Lenovo W500 - Part 5

Today I decided to get the webcam working which can be found above the display, integrated into the case. Fact is, I haven’t really looked at the device, as it wasn’t listed as such. As there are no unknown devices at the PCI bus, we can narrow our search to the USB bus which looks like that:

Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 008 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 007 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 006 Device 003: ID 046d:c049 Logitech, Inc. G5 Laser Mouse Bus 006 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 001 Device 005: ID 17ef:4807 Lenovo Bus 001 Device 004: ID 04b3:4485 IBM Corp. Serial Converter Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 004 Device 003: ID 0a5c:2145 Broadcom Corp. Bus 004 Device 002: ID 08ff:2810 AuthenTec, Inc. Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub

Do you see a camera device listed? Let’s have a closer look by excluding the things that can’t be one. So there’s a bunch of HUBs, a Mouse, an AuthenTec device and a Broadcom thing we can safely exclude. So all that remains is that strange device named Lenovo. lsusb -vvv confirms that it is a device that is able to deliver pictures and mpg streams - a camera indeed.

Regarding the drivers, the chip itself is supported by the UVC driver which is already included in the kernel. As dmesg shows, our strange device is supported:

uvcvideo: Found UVC 1.00 device (17ef:4807) input: UVC Camera (17ef:4807) as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1a.7/usb1/1-6/1-6:1.0/input/input11 usbcore: registered new interface driver uvcvideo

Now all that’s left is using some software to check /dev/video0 which shouldn’t be a big deal at all…