Laptop Webcam to USB Webcam? for Raspberry Pi

well it depends if you know what connecters to use and how to use them and if you can program it all to work and then you would also need to map out the circuits that relate to the camera your welcome

I'm doing something similar but mine is a HP pavilion Dv9000 series.  MB went out also.  My camera CMN5748 (AT005748000) and has 4 wires on it.  The microphones were a seperate component on this model.  If they are integrated to the same board then you would have 6 wires coming out of it.

From what I have been able to track down the pinout of the 4 wire one is:

Red: +5 : Pin 3 : USB +5V Pin 1 (Red)

White: Ground : Pin 1 : USB GND Pin 4 (Black)

Black: D- : Pin 5 : USB Pin 2 (White)

Blue D+ : Pin 4 : USB Pin 3 (Green)

For the 6 wire one this is what I found:

Black: Common GND for Camera and Mic : USB GND Pin 4 (Black)

Green: +5V : Pin 1 : USB +5V Pin 1 (Red)

Yellow: D+ : Pin 5 : USB Pin 3 (Green)

Orange: D- : Pin 4 : USB Pin 2 (White)

Red: Mic L : Pin 3 : (Should be able to solder up to a standard 3.5mm stereo jack then use a Male to Male 3.5mm stereo jack to put into the Mic or line in of the sound card.

Brown(could be blue??) Mic R : Pin 2

Can't say for sure the above is 100% accurate but it is what I have been able to find on HP's support fourms.  I plan on hacking up an extra USB cable at work tomorrow waiting for a computer to image and will wire up the camera and see what happens and let you know. Sounds like a good project to collaborate on to resolve.  From what I have been able to find some of the laptop cameras can work as a USB device some not. 

well if it is a usb camera did you try just plugging it in and finding the proper software

I'm finding its not just some kind of standard USB camera.  I cut all the wires and soldered them to a USB plug.  The system see a device but does not know what it is.  I've been searching for the drivers but so far not 100% luck.  There are some HP software packages I downloaded but since the machine I'm testing on is a Lenovo and not an HP the software is not running as it is specific to HP.  I may try the camera on my working HP laptop via the USB port and see what that yields.  Havn't given up yet but its not looking that promising thus far at least for my hp dv9000 camera.

it will not work just by soldering a usb cable to it in will not have a program to run on like the old computer did because that computer came standard with the software needed to run it so you will need to wire your own or give up on this project

Yeah I get "Windows has stopped this device because it has reported problems. (Code 43)" when I try to plug it in my Asus desktop...

I'm going to try it on my HP laptop and desktop at home.  I have the newest media center there.  I get the HP error on this machine.  I don't think at this point either of our cameras will work with the Pi but maybe they still have a use on another HP machine.  Shrug, I'll let you know if it worked for me or not.

I didn't get a chance to do more testing at home last night.  But I'm wondering if we are going about this the wrong way.  We both have been using windows to see if the camera will work outside of the HP laptop.  I was thinking this morning maybe the focus should shift to LINUX as this is the target system and not windows.  I had LINUX installed at one time on the laptop the camera came out of but I do not remember if I ever tried the camera within it.  I hope to test this theory over the next few days and see if that works.  Worth a try at least

Unless this device was originally implemented as a USB camera and hooked-up to USB internally, there's zero chance that you're just going to be able to wire this up as a USB webcam.  You would have been able to determine if this were the case or not when the machine was working by noting whether or not it showed up in the Device Manager somewhere under the USB tree.  If it did, then you'd stand a chance of getting it to work.

The camera module's interface could, in the general case, be anything -- SPI, MIPI CSI/CSI-2, or something custom.  Given how few wires you note that it has, it's unlikely to be CSI-2 (the connector to which the Pi Cam connects).  Without knowing a lot about camera module interfacing, this project is a non-starter if your goal is simply to get a working camera on the Pi (which you buy for $25).  If your goal is to learn a lot about camera interfacing, then this project may be a worthy one.

Just like you can't take an engine out of an arbitrary car and "solder it up" to another arbitrary car, this camera isn't going to just "drop in" to your Pi.  This isn't to say that it ultimately can't be gotten to work, the question is with how much effort.  It's conceivable some driver exists somewhere that can get you most of the way there, but whether or not it ultimately makes use of USB is fairly inconsequential.

I think our initial goal was to see how much of our dead in the water Laptops can be reused/repurposed for different projects.  I am also looking at it as an opportunity to expand my knowledge about embedded components and how they interface with different systems.  Honestly you are correct, it would be more of a viable option to just purchase the camera designed for the Pi.  I found this to be a good challenge to keep expanding my knowledge, in this case camera interfacing.  It would also be cool to reuse it for a purpose other than the Pi.  One less thing to go to the land fill

I did more digging and was finally able to read the crazy small print on the IC and found it to be a MX25L512-12G SPI chip.  I also downloaded the datasheet for the chip.  There is still another IC on the board but half of it is covered in some soft of semi transparent black coating.  I can almost read it via a magnified picture with a my phone LED light.  My next challenge reading it