by P3rv3rt B3ar on Wed Oct 29, 2008 3:10 pm 
As usual plugin is _beta_, treat it accordingly. i don accept any responsibility, monetary or otherwise for any programming errors it might contain or for damages inapropriate use might cause for your system. Also permission to use my program is only granted for ethically acceptable use. If u plan to catch ur girlfriend/wife with pool-guy on hometheatercouch use some other program for that, and think twice before: do u even want to know. PS<o>d is licensed only for uses which respect other peoples privacy. That said i dont accept any liability for privacy breaches, be it your enduser's, house burglar's, or whom freaking anybodys... responsibility is solely yours (even if u happen to live on oilrig).
Why did i made this plugin?
Ove been following Alex's efforts to code PS-eye driver for a while, and as soon as i noticed, couple days ago, that he had build a little API for the driver i just started to program without thinking much of uses for thishing. However i will present a one possible use scenario here, but basicly u need to find your own use cases. This is a project which comes out purely out of programming passion, that and ive been eyeing pseyes as possible eyes for pervette, so i might as well get my hands dirty.
What do i need to use this plugin?
* PS-eye cam, if ull miss todays gold box offer, i guess u can get eye of judgment game from mall-tart around 30 bucks or so, which includes camera also.
* PS-eye drivers, made by Alex Popovich. They come in an easy-to-install-package and are available here http://alexpopovich.wordpress.com/2008/10/02/sony-ps3eye-camera-directshow-capture-source-filter/. NOTE that u need to copy PS3EyeLib.dll file installed by plugin also into your Pervware folder, for device to work.
* Whole xtalk shebang, including hub and other needed devices, see XperT thread for instructions and marb's or sharp's sites for programs.
What i can do with this plugin?
Not much currently, as i said, i rushed it out of the door because of gold box deal, So currently u can only capture a still to a file, and thats it. However i have planned to make shooting pic series possible and also to make it possible to fetch GPS-fix data from NMEAd device and include that into saved pic files as EXIF metadata... afterwards if u use french guys Xscan u should able to base this info from picfiles... and that might be usable in future with xperts catmaps... but i wont saymore about that project yet
Use case and example
Lets say u belong to a class of us unhappy souls like me or forexample marb, rika, lars or steve himself, who live way too north... so going to the mail box on winter is a real test of endurance: u need to carry a rifle incase friendly neighborhood polar bear is waiting to score a quick snack, on the other hand u need to engulf atleast half liter of vodka no more than 15 minutes before of the feat to keep your blood flowing in freezing temperature. obviously u wanna avoid unnessary trip to the box to pick up bills or ads, but on other hand u wanna pick parcels containing new video games or movies as soon as possible, so we r faced with dilemma... but nothing what devoted xlobbyist equibbed with USB extension cable and this plugin cant solve
So firstly this device takes two commandline parameters to operate, actually it might take three but third is for GPS function which is switched of in this rushed prerelease version. First parameter is usual xtalk alias and second is folder where to save captured stills.
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PSeyed alias folder
as usual ull probably be typing this to your autorun.ini file. Heres example we use for our mail-lurker screen:
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PSeyed Silma C:\xlobby2prerelease2\skins\default\buttons\
as u can see im saving pics in xlobby skins buttons-folder. this is kinda temporarely solution cause not so surprisingly xPErT's loadpic variable didnt want to co-operate as i had hoped but luckily i managed to device a way to have core lobby to offer needed functionality. BTW it really wasnt my fault xPerT didnt operate as meant: oversimplified .net methods keep hogging R-lock of file objects far after their usefulnes has ended and these lingering locks ofcourse prevents files to be overwritten... oh well what can u expect from M$-fellows
Ok then u need a button to your skin to shoot the snapshot and the associated event:
it contains three commands, the first one is most interesting one:
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plugin
xPerT
Delegate
Silma;snapshot;picture
Here Silma is alias of PS eye device set when we launched the device, u can ofcourse use any suitable name. and "picture" is filename on which the newly shot still be saved on folder given on device launch. Two other events are inorder a timer>wait set to 500 milliseconds and xlobby>refresh image library. Note that u need to uncheck the multithreaded option of this event because of the timer use. "refresh image library" command will make sure that content picture of our mailbox inside will refresh each time we press this update button.
And finally we need the button which gives us clear view of mailbox contents, if u press above update button already once, this should be as simple as creating a new pic enough button and going into its image tab and just select the right picture, yes its the one that is totally black. unless u had enough common sense to drill holes onto your mailbox or rig up somekinda USB LED mailbox light system
good luck.
oh yeah and heres linky to the code
