We absolutely love the Raspberry Pi and how the single board computer makes Linux systems or add-ons sing and dance exactly as the user wants. Two more things we love and these are the stunning results of the Raspberry Pi camera module and the tutorial written by Boris Landoni that explain for both beginners and advanced users how to use the Pi camera and start capturing images and record videos.
But before start mounting the camera and send commands to the RPi, there are several other useful good to know information before capturing video and take images.
Currently the area of Raspberry Pi is extended in industrial and service sectors with a variety of applications already in use. The online is another source of examples where people use the Pi with a camera for slow-motion capture or to create effects. But these examples are just the tip of the iceberg, while the bottom part of the fruit-name board can be found in home security applications or in processing and packaging food, as well as agriculture, automotive and electronics production.
The Pi camera module offers a very important connectivity feature, and you should take it right away. The camcorder add-on doesn’t use the USB connection as many webcams do, it is designed with a short ribbon cable and can be attached to the Pi using a dedicated CSI interface. This interface is specially engineered for high pixel data rates from cameras.
The Pi camera comes in two versions. One version is sensitive to daylight, while the second version can be used for thermal images capture and night vision. With its coin size dimensions and a weight of just over 3g, the camera is small enough to fit in any mobile applications and especially in robotics.
The sensor itself has a resolution of 5 megapixels and is capable of 2592 x 1944 pixels for static images, while for video the range is between 640p and 1080p.
As we can already know, the preferred operating system for Pi is the Raspbian, and yes, it has support for the Pi camera.
The process of taking photos and record videos with Pi, camera, and the Rasbian OS is simple and involve two functions: raspistill for photos and raspivid for video capture.
For the full post about how to install the Pi camera, how to take an image, how to capture video, or how to operate the camera features with Python check this tutorial.