Just a quick update today:

New development hardware

In order to avoid having to regularly switch between the webcam and the WiFi adapter, I've decided to switch out the Raspberry Pi Model A+ for a Pi 2 Model B. This way, I can keep the webcam and the WiFi dongle plugged into the Pi, slightly speeding up the development process.

Once the application that should connect all the different software parts together is up and running, I can go back to the A+ to see if it also works with its fewer resources.

Webcam tests

Taking a few additional test images with the new hardware setup, and configuring FileZilla to open the image preview for JPG and PNG files, I was a little disappointed with the images. The compression seemed to be much too severe, resulting in pretty blurry images even when the camera was placed on the desk.

A quick change to my Logitech C920 webcam, the resulting image was bigger and had a much better quality and sharpness using the same parameters for the "fswebcam" program.

Switching back to the C270, I tried out a few different settings. So far the best option seems to use the "--deinterlace" option when taking the snapshots. Without this, the test image looks like this:

I also tried creating a PNG image instead of a JPG image in order to reduce the artifacts, but the result looked pretty similar.

However, using "fswebcam -r 1280x720 --no-banner --deinterlace image_1280x720_C270_deinterlaced.jpg" clearly improved the image:

The result looks slightly less sharp, but much better overall. It seems like a good option for taking images from texts.

Compared to the images I took with the C920, this isn't quite on the same level of quality, but it should be enough for now. The C920 would definitely be my preferred choice for a high quality build.

So not much for today, but with the improvements in hardware and image quality still a little progress...