Hi everyone. I picked up an Arducam EK Kit (SKU EK039 — the 5MP OX05B1S RGBIR Global Shutter USB 3.0 Camera Evaluation Kit) and I’m hoping to use it as a regular webcam. Does anyone know if there’s a ready-made UVC driver for Windows for this thing? I need to point an application at it that only accepts a standard webcam. Any info on the software stack would be really appreciated.
Thanks for the details. Just to make sure I understand your setup — you’re on Windows and you need the camera to show up as a standard UVC webcam so your app can grab it, right? Are you also open to something like RGB forwarding through a virtual webcam, or does the app strictly need native UVC?
Yes, Windows. The app enumerates UVC webcams and won’t talk to anything else. I was hoping there was either a UVC driver or some kind of bridge that forwards the RGB stream to a virtual webcam. Honestly I don’t mind how it works as long as the app sees a standard camera.
I checked the product details on this one. The EK039 is built as a specialized camera system, not a UVC device. It doesn’t present itself as a standard webcam on Windows — or any other OS for that matter — so there isn’t a ready-made UVC driver available for it.
Ah, that’s a bummer. So even a virtual webcam bridge won’t help? I was thinking something like OBS Virtual Camera or a similar tool could take the RGB and expose it as a webcam.
That’s the root of the problem. The EK kit doesn’t implement UVC (USB Video Class) functionality at all. UVC is what makes a camera appear as a standard webcam to applications. Since the kit doesn’t speak UVC, there’s no stream for a virtual webcam bridge to pick up and re-expose in the first place.
Okay, I see. So what are my actual options with this kit then?
Your options are to use it through one of the supported paths instead of treating it as a webcam: 1) the provided SDK, 2) the sample applications (like the GUI software), or 3) your own custom integration with your software. If the target application absolutely requires UVC, then you’d need to look at Arducam’s other camera lines that offer native UVC support.
To wrap it up: there’s no UVC driver and no virtual webcam bridge available for the EK039. Any UVC/webcam support has to come from a different Arducam product line that implements it natively. For the EK kit itself, the supported path is the SDK, the sample apps, or your own software integration.