So I ordered this camera with the hopes of using it on the pi

A source for all things raspberry pi camera. https://magpi.raspberrypi.org/books/essentials_camera_v1

The .apk file is an android application on android phone. The USB drive will not need a driver, but other than power it is not clear if any picture is sent. My guess is that all recording goes to sd card. Then you can access the files on the sd card through usb. I suggest to look at the android applicatiob for more details.

I think what Clem says is right, it could just be a USB cable to pull off files.

To do live video capture may need a different camera, there's some info on webcams here:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/usage/webcams/

However it used to be that very few webcams worked with Linux, so I don't know if that has changed.

The Pi camera module in Sean's link (that plugs into the flat-flex slot) could be easier to use, since the Raspbian image supports it by default.

Oh I know the apk was the android app. What was unusual was that windows recognized it as an audio device. I've seen plenty of other devices that had that "dual mount", the actual device plus some space for the drivers/application. One of my cellular modems is that way.

This doesn't have an SD card, its meant to store everything on the android device. I just hadn't seen any sort of camera recognized as an audio device before. I guess I need to forget about this for the single board computers. I primarily got it because it was the cheapest wide angle lens USB camera i found. Luckily, my miata has a full android head unit in it, so I can just throw this into there. I had pondered trying to read the serial stream and work out how its actually sending, but probably simpler to just get a wide angle webcam that will work easily with the beaglebone/raspberry pi.

Once upon a time it was common for USB devices to identify as two things at once.

This was typical with 3G USB modems, you'd plug it into your windows PC and it would identify as a USB CD-Rom drive, where you'd then pull off your driver files, once the software and drivers were installed, it would miraculously be able to negotiate and identify the 3G USB modem. You appear to have already some experience with this type of behaviour.

It's possible that your video camera has the same functionality and without having a linux driver created for it to get past this virtual cd-rom drive/usb pen drive, will not identify as a video device in linux.

When you plug it into the Raspberry Pi with Raspbian, run 'lsusb' and look up the vendor and device hex IDs on the internet, see if you can get more information about it. If you're lucky, you might find someone has created an appropriate driver for you to get further with it.

It's likely identifying as an audio device because some cameras have a microphone on them.

Thanks, i'll try that and hunt. Or give in and just use it as a dashcam in the miata and buy a decent wide angle webcam i'm looking for something to mount on the wall under or over the tv and get good coverage of the room

"However it used to be that very few webcams worked with Linux, so I don't know if that has changed."

There used to be a list of supported USB webcams which worked with the USB Video Class Linux driver listed here:

Linux UVC driver & tools

I stumbled across it when using webcams with the Intel Galileo SBC.

Another approach is to use USB audio/video class compliant devices like the AJA U-TAP

https://www.aja.com/products/u-tap-hdmi

https://www.aja.com/products/u-tap-sdi

or Epiphan AVIO and bring your video in that way without the need for yet another driver. I use them for getting broadcast video into devices that expect to use USB webcams. Not a cheap option unfortunately, but allows you to use whatever HDMI/HD-SDI device you want to.

that is a cool device (the U-Tap) but dang that price. I'll have to remember that it exists if I ever find a deep need for it

Epiphan do a similar one.

https://www.epiphan.com/products/avio-hd/

If I recall correctly you need to install a driver if you want to configure it, but once configured it is USB AV class compliant.

May be possible to do something on a budget with a FPGA dev board, as a number of them have HDMI capture and USB connectivity.

Interesting product!

It looks great for microscopes - noticed it mentions latency is extremely low.

I have a similar type thing for analog uncompressed video from The Imaging Source, but it is not HD : (