Raspberry Pi Camera

Let's build a digital camera out of a Raspberry Pi, the HQ Camera Module, and a touch screen.

The camera's settings are fully customizable:

• Shutter Speed with a touchscreen menu or hardware encoder
• ISO with a touchscreen menu or hardware encoder
• Shutter by tapping the touchscreen center or hardware button
• Aperture on the lens ring
• Focus Distance on the lens ring
• Focal Length by changing lenses

Prerequisites

Most tutorial projects I have found on the internet use OpenCV or PyGame to draw their UI. I have found these libraries to be a pain to work with, however, and use Qt for Python (aka pyside2) instead.

You will need to install:

apt install python3-pyside2.qt
pip3 install picamera[array]

Additionally, you will need to run raspi-config, go to Advanced Options and Memory Split, and adjust it to 256 Mb, otherwise the camera won't be able to take full-resolution pictures.

In terms of hardware, I use the Raspberry Pi HQ Camera, A Raspberry Pi 4, a push button, two rotary encoders, and a Waveshare 4.3" 800x480 IPS HDMI capacitive touch screen display. If you buy a different display, make sure it is connected via HDMI (we need the GPIOs and GPIO-connected displays refresh too slowly), and has a capacitive touch sensor (resistive touch is bad for slider controls).

Hardware Setup

Here is a crude drawing of the button and encoder set up:

(My encoders have a fourth +3.3V pin. I added this as an additional red wire in the schematic.)

TODO

• Power Supply
• Case
• Image Processing

License

This project is licensed under the terms of the GPL v3 license.