Webcam Discovery Module for Viam

This module provides a viam discovery service for automatically detecting and configuring webcams for use with the Viam platform.

Overview

The webcam-discovery discovery service automatically:

• Scans for connected USB webcam devices
• Detects their capabilities and configuration
• Generates the appropriate Viam resource configurations

Attributes

No models in this module have any attributes. Just add the model to your machine, expand the test card or look at the discovery control card, and copy/paste the video path to the video_path attribute on a rdk:builtin:webcam or click the add component model.

The discovery service detects the highest available resolution of the first format it finds for a usb webcam connected to the machine running viam-server.

Discovery output

Each discovered camera is returned as a camera component config with the standard webcam attributes (video_path, format, width_px, height_px, frame_rate) plus a device_id attribute. device_id is the OS-provided stable identifier for the physical device (Linux by-id/by-path, macOS AVCaptureDevice.uniqueID, Windows DirectShow friendly name) and is informational — the webcam component opens the camera via video_path.

Example config

Add this module to your Viam robot's configuration:

{
    {
  "services": [
    {
      "name": "webcam-discovery",
      "api": "rdk:service:discovery",
      "model": "viam:find-webcams:webcam-discovery",
      "attributes" : {}
    }
  ]
}
  "modules": [
    {
      "name": "find-webcams",
      "module_id": "viam:find-webcams",
      "type": "registry"
    }
  ]
}

Windows Support

On Windows, discovered webcams' returned configurations use the viam-labs:modular-webcam:webcam model instead of the built-in webcam component rdk:builtin:webcam. This dependency (github.com/viam-labs/modular-webcam) provides Windows-compatible webcam support.

We recommend using the viam-labs fragment windows-webcam, which will automatically add the find-webcams module, the modular-webcam module, as well as a discovery resource automatically for you. You can do this by navigating to your machine on app.viam.com, clicking the create button +, clicking Insert fragment, then typing windows-webcam.

Alternatively, you can manually add the viam-labs:modular-webcam module to your machine configuration:

{
  "modules": [
    {
      "name": "modular-webcam",
      "module_id": "viam-labs:modular-webcam",
      "type": "registry"
    }
  ]
}