Well, the bad news is the ant colony I was rearing has died off. I’m unsure what the problem was, but the ant queen was found dead, followed by the only two offspring dying a couple of days later.

I don’t have a decent digital camera that can take decent pictures of something as small as an ant, and I came across an old article detailing an interesting childrens toy: The Intel QX3 microscope.

It was released about 10 years ago, so I’m obviously behind the times. The resolution isn’t the greatest (the QX3 is a first-gen, but the QX5 has some improvements including better resolution).

The device runs well on linux, you need the following configuration options (in addition to normal USB drivers):

CONFIG_VIDEO_CPIA=m

CONFIG_VIDEO_CPIA_USB=m

The camera (the microscope is basically a webcam) has a number of interesting settings, all touchable via the /proc filesystem:

You can alter any of these settings by doing something like:

echo “bottomlight: on” > /proc/cpia/videoX

(I’ve found that you need to have the camera actively in use for these settings changes to actually work).

Two programs work well with the camera – xawtv and tvtime. TvTime has a few minor issues that I’ve yet to work out, but I’ll figure that out eventually (namely the buffer isn’t filling up properly). XawTV has an issue with screencaptures – again an issue I’ll work out shortly.

For better images, I’ve found that setting sensor_fps to 10 works well. One I have a specimen on the slide and in proper position, I drop that to 3 to actually take the image.

As I mentioned earlier, the resolution isn’t that great.  I’ve been told lighting is the key, and I’m still experimenting. Here’s the head of the queen ant, I’m sure of species:

I’ve just picked up a DT Research WebDT366 Tablet. I’m in need of a good touchscreen for a CarPC project, and the Lilliputs are a little more expensive than I had hoped to go (Appx, $250.00 on Ebay).

The WebDT366 was only $90 (in fairly good condition), and I figured if I didn’t end up using it for a CarPC (or as simply the touchscreen for the CarPC), I could certainly find something else to do w/ it.

tschak909 has already done a good amount of work getting Linux to run on the device. (http://forum.linuxmce.org/index.php?topic=6663.0). Thankfully it’s x86, so life should be a little easier when building custom images.

Wanting to know what packages and configuration Thom has used in his installation, I needed a way to mount the raw disk image (http://www.localeconcept.com/private/webpad-beta2.dd.bz2). Googling didn’t get me at the exact answer, but it got me close enough to figure it out.

First off, use losetup and and offset (flagged by -o).  When running “file” on the image, you’ll see something like this:

lennybruce ~ # file /tmp/webpad-beta2.dd
/tmp/webpad-beta2.dd: x86 boot sector; partition 1: ID=0x83, active, starthead 1, startsector 63, 1023057 sectors

As you can see, partition one starts at sector 63. (512 bytes * 63 = 32256). Having this information, mounting is easy:

lennybruce ~ # losetup -o 32256 /dev/loop0 /tmp/webpad-beta2.dd
lennybruce ~ # mount /dev/loop0 /mnt/loop
lennybruce ~ # ls /mnt/loop/
bin   cdrom  etc   initrd      lib         media  opt   root  selinux  sys   tmp  var
boot  dev    home  initrd.img  lost+found  mnt    proc  sbin  srv      temp  usr  vmlinuz
lennybruce ~ #

That’s it for mounting a raw disk image. Using the information Thom has provided in his image (video driver, input drivers, etc)… I’m building a custom Gentoo image that will hopefully be the basis or front-end of a CarPC.