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.