[wilsonb]

@adciv: We always tested with a power cycle in between, but it didn't change anything.

@Joe Ross and @techhelpbb those are both (trying to connect to the camera through something other than OpenCV, like WPILib; and checking /dev) good points, which I'll try as soon as I can.

@BenBernard, we're connecting the LifeCam's USB male directly to the roboRio. We haven't checked the web interface (admittedly that was quite an oversight). A while back, we ran into the problems you describe about the camera settings like exposure being reset. We resolved it by configuring the camera on startup with the v4l-ctl utility (in apt package libv4l-dev).

Oddly enough, the roboRio can see the camera now, without swapping the camera out for a new one. This suggests hardware issues to me, or possibly something with configuration of the camera (perhaps when plugging it into a laptop, the configuration reset and fixed something).