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One of the most recent Raspberry Pi accessories is the tiny Pi Camera board – a small PCB with a camera sensor mounted to it that connects to the Pi. It connects directly to the Raspberry Pi board to save USB slots, however this does not make it exactly plug and play, so you’ll need to do some extra set-up on your Raspberry Pi to get it to work.
The Pi Camera has multiple use cases, such as timelapse photography, using as a webcam or even as an optical sensor for a Pi-powered robot. As it doesn’t take up any USB ports and draws very low power, it can be a lot more versatile than a standard webcam.
The Pi Camera itself is not a low quality piece of kit either – with a 5MP sensor, it’s also able to create up to 1080p quality video, the same as the Raspberry Pi’s HDMI output. Grab your Raspbian SD card, and get started making the most out of your Pi Camera.
Resources
Raspberry Pi
Raspbian
Pi Camera from RS Components and element14
Ashton’s picam module
Step by Step
Step 01
Attach Camera
To attach the camera to the Raspberry Pi, locate the slot between the Ethernet and HDMI port, and gently lift up the fastener. Insert the ribbon of the camera board, making sure to align the ribbon’s connectors with those on the Raspberry Pi.
Step 02
Pi Preparation
Before we try and enable the Raspberry Pi camera, make sure your firmware and software are all up-to-date with a quick software upgrade. In Raspbian, we do this by opening the terminal and using:
$ sudo apt-get update
…followed by:
$ sudo apt-get upgrade
Step 03
Pi Config
Once that’s finished, run in the terminal or command line:
$ sudo raspi-config
…to start the standard configuration screen. Navigate down to Enable Camera, press Enter, and then simply key over to enable and confirm with another press of Enter. Select Finish, and reboot.
Step 04
Take Pictures
To take pictures with the Raspberry Pi Camera, you’ll simply need to enter:
$ raspistill -o image.png
This will show a five second preview of the input of the camera, and then capture the last frame of the video
Step 05
Record Video
To record a video, we use a similar command, raspivid, like so:
$ raspivid -o video.h264
Similar to the image taking,
Step 06
Picam
If you want to do a little more with the Pi Camera, there’s a simple python wrapper currently available called picam. You’ll need to install it first though, and we’ll use pip for that. Install pip with:
$ sudo apt-get install python-pip
…and then enter:
pip install https://github.com/ashtons/picam/zipball/master#egg=picam
Step 07
Picam Photos
We can now use Python to construct a script to take photos with the picam module. Very simply, all you need to do is enter:
import picam
i = picam.takePhoto()
i.save('/home/pi/test.jpg')
And running it will take photo, test.
Step 08
Advanced Photos
You can have it take photos of specific size and quality with a time-based name by editing the code to look like this:
import picam
import time
ii = picam.takePhotoWithDetails(640,480, 85)
filename = "/tmp/picam-%s.jpg" % time.strftime("%Y%m%d-%H%M%S")
ii.save(filename)
Step 09
Picam Video and More
Picam also allows you to take video in a similar way to the above, with the main difference being that you’ll use recordVideo. You can use the code to take photos or video at regular interval for timelapse, or have it trigger during a specified event
