Stop Motion Animation with Raspberry Pi

Today we tried out a little stop motion animation with Legos using our Raspberry Pi camera and the button we connected to it.

We built a mount for the Raspberry Pi camera module, from Legos naturally. It came out quite nice and it holds the camera firmly in place. Then we set up some Lego roads, a car and some characters and planned a little how we are going to move them. Taking the pictures was quite easy with our setup since we had the separate button and the camera was attached to the Lego base plates, so we didn't have to worry about moving the camera when taking a picture.

Here is a gif of our first try (created using the awesome Imanee PHP library):

It came out OK, but there were a few issues with it so we weren't entirely happy with the result. The background is a bit messy, my hand was in the picture in some of the frames and the biggest issue was that the characters were a little out of focus which made them appear blurry.

Our camera rig, with the extra lens
(attached with blu-tack)

So I Googled around a bit about how to change the focus of the Raspberry Pi camera. And turns out it has a fixed focal length, which is nice most of the time, but for this kind of thing where you want to take pictures where the objects are closer than 50cm from the lens, they will be out of focus. But I found an easy enough solution, which was to buy a pair of cheap reading glasses with lens strength +2, take out a lens and position it in front of the camera. That way the focal length is somewhere around 20-30cm, which is much better for our purposes. And the images did come out better after that, so it was quite easy and cheap hack.

This time we also made the car come from the other direction so it doesn't block so much of the view while it's waiting. Otherwise we did it pretty much the same way. I had to try and keep Kaisla's little sister preoccupied with other things as she really wanted to help also. She did get to push the button a few times to take a couple of frames, but I had to delete some of them as she was a little bit too trigger happy with the button.

Action!

After all the pictures were taken, we moved them to my laptop with rsync and created a video using a command-line utility called ffmpeg. If you are interested in the actual commands, you can check out this great post from Raspberry Pi Learning Resources, which describes each step with a little bit more detail.

Here is the final video:



This time it came out better and we were both happy with the result. Of course there's still room for improvement, for example the lighting is a bit bad since it was evening and there wasn't a lot of natural light. Maybe we'll do some more later on, if Kaisla keeps interested in it. Or maybe we'll try creating a time-lapse video next.

Taking photos with the Raspberry Pi camera module

A few days ago I told Kaisla that I have a camera for the Raspberry Pi that can be programmed with code to take pictures, and asked if she would be interested in trying it out. She got very excited and wanted to try it right away and take some pictures.

I hooked up the camera module I had lying around (I had bought it at the same time I bought all the parts for our traffic lights project) into the Raspberry Pi and then we first tried it out by taking a few pics with a command line utility called raspistill. Kaisla typed the command as I instructed, and she wanted to name the file "perhonen" (butterfly in Finnish). First picture was funny since it was upside down, so we had to add some parameters to the command to flip the image.

It worked nicely but of course it gets quite tedious to have to type some commands every time you want to take a photo. So we decided to hook up a button so we can take pictures just by pushing it. I also had some buttons (or actually, tactile switches as they are called) and an extra breadboard (most of these parts are so cheap, it pays off to get some extra while at the electronics shop or if you order online).

Then we had to Google a bit info about how those switches should be wired, since we hadn't used them before. The switch has four legs, but turns out you only need to wire two of them to make it work.

Then we wrote a quick Python script that takes a picture when the button is pressed and saves it to a file named by date and time. After that it was fun to take pictures just by pressing the button.

We have some plans to try to do a little stop motion animation, which this thing is now perfectly suited for. Just need to build some kind of camera mount to hold it in place. I will write a new post about that in a few days. Update: here is a post about our first stop motion animation.

You can find a lot of info about these things online, but here's a good guide from the  Raspberry Pi Learning Resources.