In this book about camera projects, Dogan Ibrahim begins with an overview of the important terminology and the characteristics of some ten cameras that can work with a Raspberry Pi or an Arduino. The gives a good grounding, but we would have preferred to see more information about the advantages and disadvantages of the different types of cameras. After this, the installation of the official Raspberry Pi Camera Module is explained in detail, and also the use of raspistill for taking photographs with every conceivable option, for example for time-lapse photography, and raspivid for recording videos. But the author also goes into USB webcams.

Linux users

The author, in many places, is so comprehensive with his explanations that even things that appear unrelated to cameras, such as configuring crontabs, writing microSD cards and logging into your Pi with PuTTY, are covered. For experienced Linux users this may sometimes be a bit tedious. But all this makes it into a book for beginners that stands on its own and does not require you to go looking elsewhere for all kinds of things. Even experienced readers will pick up quite a few ideas from these excursions by the author, such as how you can send photos via Bluetooth or publish to Twitter or stream videos to your YouTube channel and how you use a software-keyboard with a touch screen.

The longest chapter describes how you can talk to the RaspberryPi Camera Module using Python. No fewer than 16 projects are presented in this chapter, such as how you can make your own selfie stick with a button that the camera reacts to, or how every photo taken by camera takes is sent via email. This all finally comes together in a smart doorbell, which takes a picture of the person at the door and emails it to you, and a project to record videos of animals in the wild with a night-vision camera and a motion sensor.

Licence plate recognition

This is followed by multiple chapters that work out the details of one or a few related projects. You will learn, among other things, how you can make a security camera or a flash so that you can use your camera in low light conditions, how to run the security software Motion and the accompanying operating system motionEyeOS, and how you record and process images from the Pi camera with OpenCV and how you can read bar codes with SimpleCV. One chapter goes into Arduino projects that have a camera, combined with a micro-SD card adapter. And finally the book culminates in a project for recognising licence plates in the camera image from your Pi. Are you planning to work on a Pi project that uses a camera? Then this book will certainly give you a great start.

Author: Dogan Ibrahim
Publisher: Elektor International Media
Price: €29.95
ISBN 978-1-907920-77-6
www.elektor.com/camera-projects-book