libcamera/README.rst
Laurent Pinchart 8ea6912c96 libcamera: controls: Auto-generate control_ids.h and control_ids.cpp
Bring back auto-generation of control ids. In this version, both the
header and the source files are generated from a single YAML file that
stores all control definitions. This allows centralising controls in a
single file, while the previous version required keeping both
declarations (in a header) and documentation (in a the source) in sync
manually.

Using YAML as a format to store control definitions is a trade-off
between ease of use (there are many YAML parsers available) and
simplicity (XML was considered, but would have lead to more complex
processing). A new build time dependency is added on python3-yaml, which
should be available as a package in all distributions and build
environments.

The YAML format is likely to change over time as we improve
documentation of controls, the first version simply copies the
information currently available. Future improvements should also include
a YAML schema to validate the YAML source file.

Signed-off-by: Laurent Pinchart <laurent.pinchart@ideasonboard.com>
Reviewed-by: Niklas Söderlund <niklas.soderlund@ragnatech.se>
2019-10-05 20:02:51 +03:00

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===========
libcamera
===========
**A complex camera support library for Linux, Android, and ChromeOS**
Cameras are complex devices that need heavy hardware image processing
operations. Control of the processing is based on advanced algorithms that must
run on a programmable processor. This has traditionally been implemented in a
dedicated MCU in the camera, but in embedded devices algorithms have been moved
to the main CPU to save cost. Blurring the boundary between camera devices and
Linux often left the user with no other option than a vendor-specific
closed-source solution.
To address this problem the Linux media community has very recently started
collaboration with the industry to develop a camera stack that will be
open-source-friendly while still protecting vendor core IP. libcamera was born
out of that collaboration and will offer modern camera support to Linux-based
systems, including traditional Linux distributions, ChromeOS and Android.
Getting Started
---------------
To build and install:
::
meson build
cd build
ninja
ninja install
Dependencies
------------
The following Debian/Ubuntu packages are required for building libcamera.
Other distributions may have differing package names:
A C++ toolchain: [required]
Either {g++, clang}
for libcamera: [required]
meson ninja-build python3-yaml
for device hotplug enumeration: [optional]
pkg-config libudev-dev
for qcam: [optional]
qtbase5-dev libqt5core5a libqt5gui5 libqt5widgets5
for documentation: [optional]
python3-sphinx doxygen