You will be pleased to know that Starbucks in Taipei opened on time today, there's nothing like a Grande Vanilla Latte to wake one up in the morning especially when you're suffering with Jet Lag...

It's time to answer a common inbound question - A number of teams in the Windows ChallengE are using the eBoxII reference board http://www.icop.com.tw/products_detail.asp?ProductID=132 and are wanting to hook up a webcam - the MSDN “Get Embedded“ article http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnembedded/html/embedded09172002.asp describes how to hook up a 1394 webcam to a CEPC to get this working - unfortunately, the Vortex86 reference board doesn't have a PCI slot, so you can't attach a 1394 webcam - the reference board does have USB connectors, so you could potentially hook up a USB WebCam, unfortunately Windows CE .NET 4.2 doesn't ship with USB WebCam drivers - so, one way to get this working would be to use something like the eCAMIT IP camera from 3JTech - http://www.3jTech.com - you could pull images from the camera and display the output in a .NET Compact Framework application - the sample code below shows how to use the PictureBox control in a C# .NET Compact Framework application to display an image.

- Mike

using System;

using System.Drawing;

using System.Collections;

using System.Windows.Forms;

using System.Data;

namespace GetImage

{

/// <summary>

/// Summary description for Form1.

/// </summary>

public class Form1 : System.Windows.Forms.Form

{

private System.Windows.Forms.PictureBox pictureBox1;

private System.Windows.Forms.OpenFileDialog openFileDialog1;

private System.Windows.Forms.Button GetImage;

public Form1()

{

//

// Required for Windows Form Designer support

//

InitializeComponent();

//

// TODO: Add any constructor code after InitializeComponent call

//

}

/// <summary>

/// Clean up any resources being used.

/// </summary>

protected override void Dispose( bool disposing )

{

base.Dispose( disposing );

}

#region Windows Form Designer generated code

/// <summary>

/// Required method for Designer support - do not modify

/// the contents of this method with the code editor.

/// </summary>

private void InitializeComponent()

{

this.pictureBox1 = new System.Windows.Forms.PictureBox();

this.GetImage = new System.Windows.Forms.Button();

this.openFileDialog1 = new System.Windows.Forms.OpenFileDialog();

//

// pictureBox1

//

this.pictureBox1.Location = new System.Drawing.Point(8, 8);

this.pictureBox1.Size = new System.Drawing.Size(624, 328);

//

// GetImage

//

this.GetImage.Font = new System.Drawing.Font("Tahoma", 18F, System.Drawing.FontStyle.Regular);

this.GetImage.Location = new System.Drawing.Point(8, 344);

this.GetImage.Size = new System.Drawing.Size(616, 64);

this.GetImage.Text = "Get Image";

this.GetImage.Click += new System.EventHandler(this.GetImage_Click);

//

// openFileDialog1

//

this.openFileDialog1.Filter = "Bitmaps|*.bmp";

this.openFileDialog1.InitialDirectory = "\\Windows";

//

// Form1

//

this.Controls.Add(this.GetImage);

this.Controls.Add(this.pictureBox1);

this.Text = "Form1";

}

#endregion

/// <summary>

/// The main entry point for the application.

/// </summary>

static void Main()

{

Application.Run(new Form1());

}

private void GetImage_Click(object sender, System.EventArgs e)

{

if (DialogResult.OK == openFileDialog1.ShowDialog( )) {

pictureBox1.Image=new System.Drawing.Bitmap(openFileDialog1.FileName);

}

}

}

}