Upcycle Camera

A Raspberry Pi project. Upcycling an old camera with an HQ Camera sensor and touchscreen display.

About

I wanted to build my own camera, making use of the HQ Camera module for the Raspberry Pi.

This repository contains information about the hardware and software I used to create my very own "Upcycle Camera".

Hardware

Camera body

Let's start with the camera body: an original Kodak Brownie Cresta. I bought this for about £5 on eBay in an auction.

I gutted the body, removing any internal components and removed the original lens. I also cut away the rear and a chunk from the centre-bottom of the case. I also drilled a new hole to house a new (digital!) shutter button. All this created enough room for the new, upgraded components.

Electronics

For the electronics, I've used:

Raspberry Pi 4B – though any B-sized Raspberry Pi should work in this size camera body
Raspberry Pi HQ Camera – paired with a cheap attachable lens from Amazon
PiSugar 2 Pro – to provide external power when out and about
Waveshare 4.3" Capacitive Touch Display for Raspberry Pi, DSI Interface, 800×480 – to show the new camera interface

Software

Raspberry Pi OS Lite
- xinit unclutter
- lightdm
- openbox
- tint2
Python 3
- picamera
- tkinter
- guizero
- Pillow
- gpiozero

Usage

Install required packages for the camera app

I started with a clean install of Raspbery Pi OS (née Raspbian Buster). You could also use the desktop version, but I'm keeping things light! To install all of the required software packages, you can use these two commands:

sudo apt-get install python3-pip python-picamera python3-picamera python3-gpiozero python3-tk libopenjp2-7 libtiff5 lightdm openbox obconf menu obmenu feh tint2 xfce4-panel xinit unclutter

sudo pip3 install pillow guizero

This will install PIP, the required Python libraries for the camera, GPIO pins and GUI, and the necessary libraries for displaying a slimmed down desktop environment and window manager.

Install the battery software

After a failed attempt to get the PiJuice battery system working, I switched to the [PiSugar 2 Pro]. With this software installed, you get a little web server that allows you to see and control battery functions over a local network connection. The camera app pings this server to check the battery level every minute or so.

Install the software with:

curl http://cdn.pisugar.com/release/Pisugar-power-manager.sh | sudo bash

Give the `pi` user `root` privileges

To make sure you have the ability to write and execute the programme in the desktop environment you'll create, add add the default pi user to root.

sudo su
adduser pi root
adduser pi sudo
adduser pi netdev 
adduser pi users

I found that the pi was already a member of these groups by default, but it's worth double checking!

Edit /etc/sudoers file in your preferred editor – e.g. sudo nano /etc/sudoers

Amend the file to look like this:

# User privilege specification
root	ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL

# Allow members of group sudo 
# to execute any command
%sudo	ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL

# add this below
pi ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL

Create the desktop environment

Next you'll want to make sure you tell the OS to boot into the desktop environment.

Run sudo raspi-config and navigate to 3 Boot Options / B1 Desktop / Cli and choose B2 Console Autologin.

Edit rc.local in your preferred editor – e.g. sudo nano /etc/rc.local.

At the end, before exit 0 add startx &. Close the file when you're done.

WARNING: It is very important you put the commands in rc.local before the exit 0!

Edit xinitrc in your preferred editor – e.g. sudo nano /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc

Comment this line (add a hash to the start)

# . /etc/X11/xsession

Add this line to start openbox:

exec openbox-session

Close this file when you're done.

Run apps on start up

Next you need to tell Openbox which programmes to run when it's finished loading by adding your programs with autostart.

sudo nano /etc/xdg/openbox/autostart

Add your commands so that it runs:

tint2 – for creating a dock from which you can load programmes. You'll want to reference the custom set up file in this directory so that it adds an icon that loads this app
unclutter – to hide the mouse pointer on the touch screen
the camera app

tint2 -c /home/pi/hqcamera/tint2.conf &
unclutter -idle 0 &
/home/pi/hqcamera/main.py & # << This is the Python app

IMPORTANT: End all commands with & or they will prevent the others from loading.

Create a folder for your photos

Next you will need to create a directory called photos in your pi home folder to store images in.

mkdir $HOME/photos

Now if you sudo reboot, the desktop environment should load along with the camera interface. You should see something like this:

Save some power

You may want to additionally turn off some hardware features to save some power. I chose to switch off the HDMI ports and USB ports as they're not used.

Turn off USB power

Turn off the USB ports (and thus stop them using any power!) with the following command:

echo '1-1' |sudo tee /sys/bus/usb/drivers/usb/unbind

Switch unbind to bind to turn them back on.

Turn off HDMI power

Turn off the HDMI ports (and thus stop them using any power!) with the following command:

sudo /opt/vc/bin/tvservice -o

Switch -o to -p to turn them back on.

https://learn.pi-supply.com/make/how-to-save-power-on-your-raspberry-pi/

Acknowledgements

Tips on setting up the desktop environment – Bristol Watch Tips on power saving – Pi Supply

johnpeart / upcycle-camera Goto Github PK

upcycle-camera's Introduction