If you have a Raspberry Pi camera module, you’ve probably used raspistill and raspivid, which are command line tools for using the camera. Dave Jones, a Database Admin, software developer and SQL know-it-all based in Manchester has been working on an equivalent, feature complete implementation of these in Python. This means you can access the camera module directly from a Python script, without using os.system or executing a subprocess.
Raspberry Pi Camera Board – The Raspberry Pi Camera Module is a custom designed add-on for Raspberry Pi. It attaches to Raspberry Pi by way of one of the two small sockets on the board upper surface. This interface uses the dedicated CSI interface, which was designed especially for interfacing to cameras. The CSI bus is capable of extremely high data rates, and it exclusively carries pixel data. (read more)
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I just used this library in a recent project and have to agree, it’s really great and should be the defacto way to access the pi camera from python. One thing the library really nails is the documentation–it’s thorough and full of great examples about how to use the camera with other python libraries like OpenCV.
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I just used this library in a recent project and have to agree, it’s really great and should be the defacto way to access the pi camera from python. One thing the library really nails is the documentation–it’s thorough and full of great examples about how to use the camera with other python libraries like OpenCV.