Raspberry Pi + Camera for £26

Flagged up on RISCOScode a couple of days ago:

There is a good deal on buying a Raspberry Pi model A plus Camera for £26 +VAT
http://uk.farnell.com/raspberry-pi/raspberry-pi-cam/kit-raspberry-pi-model-a-camera/dp/2353309

The Camera alone used to cost £28:
http://www.cjemicros.co.uk/micros/individual/newprodpages/prodinfo.php?prodcode=RPI-CAMERA-5M

I was wondering if anyone had got this working with RISC OS ?
I asked CJE Micros at the Portsmouth Show a couple of weeks ago but they thought no one had written a driver for it.
I’d have bought one then if it had worked with RISC OS. Now it’s down in price I thought it worth asking on the ROOL forum.
http://www.RISCOScode.com

It is my understanding that the camera interfacing and such is handled by the GPU, either as a part of the standard firmware or as a binary blob loaded later. As such, akin to the ability to play HD video, such facilities are simply not available to us as the manufacturers are a lot less open about their GPUs than anything else.
Maybe one day well have a Linux module loader so we can just ‘borrow’ the code used in Linux. I’m not aware of anything of this nature…yet.

Yes I’m sure I was told by someone authoritative that GPU does nearly all the work. IIRC I was also told that they didn’t think the GPU require much setting up. RISC OS already talks to the GPU at a low level, what I don’t think is available yet is an API to talk to the GPU in general and the information as to how to command the Camera. Though that information may be in the Linux sources or would probable be forthcoming from the Foundation.

Sounds like a very long term prospect. For my application, however, I’d be quite happy to run the camera from an RPi model A under Rasbian as long as I can overlay the pictures on the monitor screen with a GUI generated by my RPi model B running RISC OS. Any chance of pulling that trick off in the foreseeable future? Must admit, I can’t quite see how to get the monitor to combine the video inputs from two such sources……