Raspberry Pi LESSON 44: Getting Ready to Master the Raspberry Pi Camera

Announcing the Most Awesome Raspberry Pi Lessons of All Times! This time we RUMBLE!

In this class series, we will be using the most excellent Sunfounder Ultimate Raspberry Pi kit, available here: (Affiliate Link)

With this class, we will begin the next major section of this class. We will be using the Raspberry Pi camera, and today's class describes the strategy we will be taking in future lessons, and the reasons for that strategy. Hope you will understand better the different options we have, and why we have choses the option we have.

If you want to grab those cool little straight jumper wires I am using to keep my breadboard builds neat and clean you can snag a box of them here:

If you guys are interested in the oscilloscope I am using, you can pick one up here (affiliate link):

You guys get your hardware ordered so you can follow along at home!

You will also need a Raspberry Pi. I suggest the Raspberry Pi 4. If you do not already have one, this is the most suitable gear I could find:

The Raspberry Pi's are sort of pricy right now, so you can look on ebay or elsewhere to see if there are any deals. You will need a SD card. If you do not already have one, this is a good one:

I like using a wireless keyboard and mouse to have fewer wires. You can certainly use your USB keyboard and mouse, but if you want a nice wireless one, this one works on the pi. We demonstrate this by using a button switch to control a LED.

You guys can help me out over at Patreon, and that will help me keep my gear updated, and help me keep this quality content coming:

#PiCamera
#PiCam
#RASPBERRYPI

[MrCameronMoore]

Hi Paul, this lesson updates us on two major changes, the move to a 64 bit operating system and the new camera library, so it wasn’t a waste of time.

[biancaar]

Please dont say sorry for doing this for 1 class, this is a life saver ... as it put several concepts in place for us

[cbrombaugh]

Thanks for taking your time and effort to prepare us for settling up the camera, Paul. Your patience is amazing.

[woodturner]

An extra video here or there to explain details is vastly superior than us missing some detail and wondering what we missed in a follow on video.

[WASR]

Thank you for all of your lessons and hard work. I am learning a lot from your channel.

[ScottSummerill]

Talking to the future. I love it! Can't wait to see what do with 20-ish camera lessons.

[tntragan]

Always good to lay a good foundation. I didn't feel it was a waste of time. I'm ready to roll with the new lessons.

[jeraldgooch]

Thank you for taking the time to update the course to the new OS! I suspect that this to a lot of research as well as trial and error to get right. Much, much appreciated!

[larryplatzek]

Paul I am glad to see where we are going!

[rienwijnsma]

Good video, thanks. For those who can not wait, the Magpi magazine ( at least the Dutch one ) had a great article about the PI camera recently.

[LorenBurdette]

Really looking forward to this series of lessons!

[saumitit]

Thank you so so much Mr. Paul I couldn't be more grateful! I'm a college student and I have a project to present where I chose the topic "Face Detection using OpenCV with Raspberry Pi" and I'm so glad I found this video(and this gem of a channel) in my research....
I initially developed the project on my personal system and later decided to port it to Raspberry Pi.
However, I encountered some challenges when copying the .venv environment. Despite both my original system and Raspberry Pi running Linux, the ARM architecture posed differences since mine is x86_64.
I attempted to install the opencv-contrib-python package using pip on the default 32-bit OS, but I couldn't find any prebuilt binaries. It seemed that the focus has shifted to newer 64-bit OS, as you mentioned.
Hence, it would then start Compiling the code from source and building the wheel... which took several hours and even after that I encountered persistent errors that I tried to but just couldn't resolve.
Eventually, I switched to the Raspberry Pi OS 64-bit version, and the transition was incredibly smooth. I didn't need to update mirrors or modify any /boot/config file to get VNC working and I was able to install the python modules :)
Unfortunately, now my original code wouldn't work with OpenCV :(( I initially thought it might be a hardware issue but libcamera functioned perfectly
Thank you for guiding me to use picamera2 and making those changes in my code... Now I have succeeded in using my program in Raspberry Pi 64-bit latest OS :))
Thank you for guiding me to use picamera2 and implementing the necessary changes in my code. As a result, I have successfully achieved running my program on the latest Raspberry Pi 64-bit OS and I'm so happy with the outcome!
There's still a lot more work to do now, but going forward, it will be a lot of fun! Your help has been invaluable thanks again! Love from India!

[charlotteswift]

Hi Paul.
We're all looking forward to your series of lessons on the Pico but it's much more important to concentrate on your health.
Hope you get well soon.

[stephenlightkep]

Thanks Paul. I love it! I am 8 months behind and I found that my Raspberry pi 4B Was too new for your visual python lesson. Which was a bummer. So I am hoping to have better luck with the camera.

[spencervdp]

Hey Paul, for my college project i was gonna build an automatic drilling robot that simply detects small black dots that you mark on a metal backplate and drills out each marking. I only found one video about my exact idea called automatic drilling by point detection.

[michealmyers]

Hey Awesome video Paul...Thanks again!
By the way...can we transfer this image to our system wirelessly or something by some means?...Thanks

[alexandregnpaie]

im way back a arduino but i decide to come to yours newest video to thank you for your time and you excellent way of teaching where can we show our gratitude. ? i will not nedd to take high end class so if i can give some someting i will !

[vaughntaylor]

Paul Since when do you ever waste anyone's time...No, Great intro, thank you! God Bless and may Father heal you quickly!

[larryplatzek]

yes brian show your install of bullseye!

[DrDave]

Awesome lesson, Paul! Time well spent. I need to comment that RPi doesn’t make it very easy to select 64bit OS. First, it recommends 32bit selection, then you have to find the 64bit OS selection deeper in the choices.
One more thing to everyone: make sure you choose the correct keyboard. Somehow I chose English UK, which caused my Wi-Fi password not to work, due to the keyboard to have some of the special characters to be different..