Friday 1 August 2014

Success with the camera = Happy Raspberry Pi Time!

From the success of yesterday and how much my son enjoyed it all I felt motivated to get on and do some more. After popping into school to pick up a different camera module and a bigger SD card I thought that I would give the camera one last chance. 

I set up a new SD card and plugged in the camera module, and ran the raspistill, then held my breath expecting the camera to hang again, instead I got a great image of the fish tank at a wonky angle! But success, so it is either the new SD card or the camera module, I have not been back to visit the old stuff yet to find out which one it is as I thought "It's working! Let's get something done!"


From this success I went on to test it out with the python picamera test code and again it all worked, so I went on and put the button in to take an image. A less wonky image of the fish tank this time.




Next was to try out a bit of time-lapse work, after putting the Raspberry Pi and the camera together with a power supply and mount on a cup-a-soup box with some blue tack and a elastic band I was ready to try it all out. I decided to push the boat out and use putty to remote control the Raspberry Pi as I wanted to be able to position the camera in a better place than if it was attached to the lap-dock. I set up the putty to link the Raspberry Pi to it, did a quick search to find a simple way to create a time-lapse with the camera and then set it up. I liked the fact the I could use the raspistill to create the time-lapse as it made doing a quick test some much easier, in fact working out the milliseconds was the difficult part.

From this quick bit of time-lapse, I put it together into a very rough mp4, again using one line in the LX Terminal to put it together. Super stuff! Shame the content of the images is not as exciting as the actual creation of it!

Here is the video in all it's glory!?!