Adafruit and Arrow have partnered again to bring you a simple point-and-shoot digital camera.
This product bundle explores the Adafruit PiTFT touchscreen and the Raspberry Pi camera board to create a simple point-and-shoot digital camera. You even have the option to use WiFi and Dropbox to automatically transfer photos to another computer for editing via the cloud.
This isn’t likely to replace your digital camera (or even phone-cam) anytime soon It’s meant to be a learning exercise and not a polished consumer item. However, since the code is open source, you or others might customize it into something special that your regular camera can’t do!
Alright let’s take a look at what we’ve got and put it together.
We’ve got the Raspberry Pi 3 (wifi built in so no need for a wife dongle), Raspberry Pi Camera, Adafruit Pi tft (thin film transistor) touch screen, a case for the tft, and a power adapter. Ideally you would get a USB battery pack so you don’t need to be tied to an outlet when taking photos.
To prepare your memory card, first you want to download the Win32DiskImager utility found on Raspberry Pi’s website. Keep in mind this is for Windows. You would need a different one for your Mac or Linux operating system. This utility is used to write image files to SD and USB memory devices. Then download the FULL version of Raspbian Jessie-based PiTFT image for Resistive touch screen. The lite version is missing some of your necessary libraries. Simply run the utility, point it at your image file, and then select the removable device to write to. You’re memory card was already pre-loaded with NOOBS so you’re now good to go! Plug that memory card into the Pi.
Put it together. A great thing about this project is that there really isn’t any wiring or soldering. It’s just a matter of plugging in the camera and the touch screen shield. Show putting it all together.
Note that there isn’t a dedicated hole for the camera’s ribbon cable. You can either do some fancy folding to route it out of the HDMI hole, or use a Dremel to file a little bit of this lip down in order to route the camera’s cable out the side. Realize that depending on how you route the camera out, it may not automatically be upright. In order for the camera to be upright, you will need to add the camera.rotation=180 code after lines 476 and 576 in cam.py.
So once it’s all put together, follow the steps from Adafruit’s learning page on how to make the DIY WiFi Raspberry Pi Touchscreen Camera. Note that they added some prerequisite software on this page to step it back to Wheezy, an older Debian version, as there were a few hiccups in functionality with Jessie. Also be sure to change the international setting to US, otherwise your keyboard keys aren’t accurate, for example the @ symbol and “ are reversed.
You may enjoy coding, but you probably don’t love watching other people do it. To spare you I took care of that ahead of time.
Alright are you ready to check it out?
Since I powered mine off and back on, I’ll just hit CTRL ALT F1 to jump to the terminal. Then I’ll add the final bits of code to initiate the camera. Notice I have a keyboard dongle to make the process a lot faster. You may even want to hook your camera up to an external monitor during setup if you can’t handle reading the tiny font on the touch screen.
And there you have it! Just touch the screen to take a photo. This sleek little interface even has options for special visual photo effects. I’d recommend using double sided tape or sticky foam to secure the camera on the outside of the case.
If you’re interested in this Adafruit touchscreen camera bundle pack, its part number 3275 on Arrow.com.