BASIC USAGE OF RASPISTILL

 

With the camera module connected and enabled, enter the following command in the Terminal to take a picture:

 

 

raspistill -o cam.jpg

 

 

 

In this example the camera has been positioned upside-down. If the camera is placed in this position, the image must be flipped to appear the right way up.

 

VERTICAL FLIP & HORIZONTAL FLIP

 

With the camera placed upside-down, the image must be rotated 180° to be displayed correctly. The way to correct for this is to apply both a vertical and a horizontal flip by passing in the -vf and -hf flags:

 

 

raspistill -vf -hf -o cam2.jpg

 

Vertical and horizontal flipped photo

 

Now the photo has been captured correctly.

 

RESOLUTION

 

The camera module takes pictures at a resolution of 2592 x 1944 which is 5,038,848 pixels or 5 megapixels.

 

FILE SIZE

 

A photo taken with the camera module will be around 2.4MB. This is about 425 photos per GB.

 

Taking 1 photo per minute would take up 1GB in about 7 hours. This is a rate of about 144MB per hour or 3.3GB per day.

 

BASH SCRIPT

 

You can create a Bash script which takes a picture with the camera. To create a script, open up your editor of choice and write the following example code:

 

#!/bin/bash

 

DATE=$(date +"%Y-%m-%d_%H%M")

 

raspistill -vf -hf -o /home/pi/camera/$DATE.jpg

 

This script will take a picture and name the file with a timestamp.

 

You'll also need to make sure the path exists by creating the camera folder:

 

mkdir camera

Say we saved it as camera.sh, we would first make the file executable:

 

chmod +x camera.sh

Then run with:

 

./camera.sh

 

MORE OPTIONS

 

For a full list of possible options, run raspistill with no arguments. To scroll, redirect stderr to stdout and pipe the output to less:

 

raspistill 2>&1 | less

 

Use the arrow keys to scroll and type q to exit.