The webcam I use for my birdfeeder stream regularly exhibits a glitch where the autoexposure gets stuck.
This often leads to an underexposed image in low light conditions.
Restarting the device resolves this but I wanted a simpler and less intrusive workaround.
I found that toggling the exposure mode to manual and back to auto resolved the issue temporarily.
Scheduling this using a V4l2 command in crontab works well for my use case:
v4l2-ctl -d /dev/cams/cam3 -c auto_exposure=1
v4l2-ctl -d /dev/cams/cam3 -c auto_exposure=3You can see from my cron, I’ve scheduled this to run on the hour and at a minute past the hour.