We are going to start from the very beginning. The first step we must accomplish is connecting our camera to our computer, running the driver, and checking the images it acquires in ROS. Before we go into ROS, it is always a good idea to use external tools to check that the camera is actually recognized by our system, which in our case is an Ubuntu distro. We will start with FireWire cameras, since they are better supported in ROS, and later we will see USB ones.
Connect your camera to the computer, which should have a FireWire IEEE1394a or IEEE1394b slot (you will probably need an IEEE1394 board or a laptop such as a Mac). Then, in Ubuntu, you only need Coriander to check that the camera is recognized and working. If not already installed, just install Coriander. Then run it (in the older Ubuntu distros, you may have to run it as sudo
):
coriander
It will automatically detect all your FireWire cameras, as shown in the following screenshot...