Getting started with Raspberry pi 3 and pi camera module
I wanted to build a weekend project that allows me to send an email and capture the picture of a target environment and finally receive automatic reply as an email with attached snapshot. Therefore, I bought Raspberry pi 3 with a separate pi camera module from amazon.de. Here’s how I took my first picture and video from raspberry pi :)
- After unboxing the starter toolkit, I had to connect pi camera module to the Raspberry pi board.
- Insert micro SD card(already loaded with Raspbian os) into memory slot.
- Connect Raspberry pi and monitor using HDMI cable.
- Connect mouse and keyboard using USB port.
- Connect power supply adapter and Raspberry board using micro usb.
- Turn on the monitor after connecting it to the power supply.
- From the options displayed on the screen I choosed Raspbian pi os and installed it.
- Connected to WIFI from the wifi option on the top-right corner of the desktop.
- Opened terminal from the options on top-left corner of the desktop.
- Used following commands and waited until it was installed successfully.
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
I had problems using sudo apt-get upgrade for the first time because some of the packages were not installed properly. Therefore, I had to restart and try above commands again and it worked :). It took around 3 to 5 minutes to successfully install all the required packages. - Used command sudo raspi-config to enable camera module.
Note: We don’t have ‘Enable Camera’ option directly on the first popup window in pi 3 model but we can use choose ‘Interfacing Options’ to enable/disable camera option.
11. Used following command to capture and save images and videos.
raspistill -o image1.jpg => captures image and save as image1.jpg
raspivid -o video.h264 -t 50000 => captures video for 50 sec and save it as video.h264, we can’t specify .mp4 or other video format rather, we can use converter to convert .h264 format to other formats.
omxplayer video.h264 => Will play the video file.
Note:- FYI, I bought following Raspberry pi starter kit and pi camera module
Raspberry pi 3 starter kit
Raspberry pi camera
