Capture video stream from LEGO Studio Camera (Logitech USB webcam) in ev3dev? Once upon a time, LEGO made a digital camera for the LEGO Studios and Mindstorms line. Internally it's an old USB Logitech camera repackaged in a LEGO housing.



It could also be used with the old LEGO Mindstorms software, to do some very weak video recognition when connected to a PC.

Fast forward some years, and Mindstorms are much more powerful, and even have a USB port, which this camera can be attached to, as some people have done.



When used with ev3dev, it's even possible to take some low-res pictures with it using a CLI tool like fswebcam.

However, I'd like to use it as a webcam, and capture a constant video stream from it, so I can use it in competitions where only official LEGO parts are allowed. Seems easy enough, but I've so far been unsuccessful.

It seems that OpenCV doesn't support the camera, because it uses an unusual pixel format encoding. Has anyone found a good solution for capturing a constant video stream? Something better than repeatedly calling fswebcam and parsing the output file (which would be unnecessarily slow).
Since I'm no software engineer my solution would be to retrofit the insides with known compatible hardware. Cheating? Maybe... but it isn't like the original hardware inside was actually Lego to begin with.  The mention of potentially using "compatible software" would seem to be already stepping out of bounds with "only official Lego parts", since it didn't come packaged with it. So...