I got my 2nd gen webcam and it generally functions well, though there are some autodetection issues with some applications. For example, chromium based browsers seem not to see the 720p resolution option, so it’ll fall back to VGA in Google Meet and similar.
I’m also curious if any framerates other than 30fps are supported by this chip, and if Framework has leeway to push firmware to advertise those over UVC. Particularly 24-based framerates are of interest to me.
Also one frustrating thing is that the v4l controls don’t have an integrated ‘gain’ control like many UVC cameras (e.g. Logitech Brio), which makes pinning exposure a bit painful (because you have to play with contrast and brightness separately).
So in summary:
- investigate issues with how the camera is detected, which cause it to default to worst-case resolution in chromium on linux, and see whether this can be resolved with tweaks to how UVC modes are exposed.
- look into framerates other than 30 (if possible with these chips)
- look into exposing a single gain control (in addition to existing controls)
I am of course assuming here that Framework has the ability to make changes like these to the firmware, and that fwupd isn’t wrong when it says the firmware is updatable. I assume this is the case since there is a customized privacy switch feature which is exposed through UVC.