How to interoperate between PC and camera from cell phone

Question

Hi everyone!!

My new project is to build an application to use the cell phone camera as the main camera from my PC.

How can I do this kind of stuff?

I thought of using bluetooth, but how my PC define the cell phone as the main camera?

Best reguards.

Answer 1

Depending on the camera phone and its features, you can do it. For my Bluetooth efforts, I've been using A7 hardware and a .NET library Blue Tools from Franson.

I've been able to:

• pair devices in code
• send/push images to the phone (probably the reverse would work, but I didn't try)
• discover devices automagically
• serial comm
• network com
• install as a network driver

Answer 2

Well on the Bluetooth side of things you might need a program running on you phone to forward the images. Or you might find that there's a Bluetooth program already running and providing that service, for instance the Bluetooth BASIC IMAGING PROFILE (BIP) ([1]) profile includes the usage scenario: "Use of a mobile phone to control the shutter of a digital still camera and immediately examine the result on the phone’s screen. In the present scenario, any other portable imaging device could play the role of the mobile phone."

So first you need to find if the phone supports BIP. You could for instance use the SdpBrowser sample application in my 32feet.NET .NET Bluetooth library to see what services the phone is advertising. Otherwise perhaps its documentation will tell you. You'd then have to find out whether the BIP service on your phone supports that scenario.

On the PC side you might need some driver level software to allow any application to use the remote camera. You might start by just allowing your own application alone to use the camera.