Teacher's Pet Students' Robotics Challenge: Attendance Automator—Blog Entry 7: Cameras

23 Sep 2015

TL;DR: This is a summary of my progress so far (to be continued) on getting the Raspberry Pi NoIR camera to work for thermography.

For this initial setup, I’m following the directions from Raspberry Pi Org: https://www.raspberrypi.org/help/camera-module-setup/

The first step here was to install the camera board itself. The board ribbon will gone into the Raspberry Pi’s “CSI Port.”

There. It’s inserted into the CSI Port.

And now it’s been gently doubled over to fit within the Raspberry Pi Project Kit Case.

Yes, I’ve left the lens cover on because I am very afraid of damaging it just yet.

Here, on Raspberry Pi .Org, is an answer to my previous query over the NoIR aspect of the kit. The NoIR is an acryonym for “No Infrared [Filter],” which is to say this camera takes photos in visible light as well as infrared. This *might* not be the best solution for thermography, but let’s keep going.

Referring again to RaspberryPi.org, let’s follow these directions for connecting the camera in software (https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/usage/camera/README.md).

Here, from Terminal, I am able to access the ‘rasps-config’ command to enable the camera. [Notice how this screen exists in Terminal, but the GUI "x" does not. Type 'startx' and get an error.]

Next, I would like to try taking an image with the camera, just to see how it looks. RaspberyPi.org has a short list of terminal commands for the camera (https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/usage/camera/raspicam/README.md).