Raspberry PI camera for video use

spencer1 · December 28, 2017, 1:23pm

Hi, we’ve just got our Brickpi 3 (with Raspberry Pi3) and have managed to get Scratch working to control the motors and sensors. We also bought a Raspberry Pi camera.

I was really hoping to build a robot with my son that can be programmed in scratch to use the EV3 motors and sensors and the raspberry pi camera. It seems though that the camera can only be used to take still photos. Is this correct.

One other thing I have tried is to use scratch 2.0 which has commands for utilising the camera for video however I cannot get any of the lego motors or sensors to work with scratch 2.0.

So my question is:
a: can scratch 2.0 operate the ev3 motors and sensors?
b: can scratch 1.4 operate the Raspberry Pi camera to operate as video camera as opposed to just a still camera?

Thanks very much for any help o this.

Spencer

cleoqc · December 28, 2017, 2:27pm

Hello @spencer1

You are, I’m sorry, absolutely right.
Scratch 2 does not support the BrickPi, nor any other of our robots.
And Scratch 1.4 will only let you take photos, no videos.

The hardware is quite capable of taking videos but you will have to move to Python to take advantage of it.

Cleo

spencer1 · December 28, 2017, 3:09pm

OK thanks for your prompt reply Cleoqc.

Can you point me towards any tutorials that would help us getting started in python for brickpi? On your website it shows examples of projects but nothing seems to explain using python with brickpi fro the ground up (unless I’m missing something?).

Thanks again

Spencer

RobertLucian · December 29, 2017, 7:39pm

Hi @spencer1,

We have various documentation here:
https://www.dexterindustries.com/brickpi3-tutorials-documentation/

Guide on how to install the BrickPi3:
https://www.dexterindustries.com/BrickPi/brickpi3-getting-started-step-4-program-brickpi-robot/brickpi3-getting-started-program-python/

And you can also find comments inside the brickpi3 module here:

github.com

DexterInd/BrickPi3/blob/master/Software/Python/brickpi3.py

# https://www.dexterindustries.com/BrickPi/
# https://github.com/DexterInd/BrickPi3
#
# Copyright (c) 2017 Dexter Industries
# Released under the MIT license (http://choosealicense.com/licenses/mit/).
# For more information see https://github.com/DexterInd/BrickPi3/blob/master/LICENSE.md
#
# Python drivers for the BrickPi3

from __future__ import print_function
from __future__ import division
#from builtins import input

import subprocess # for executing system calls
import spidev
import array      # for converting hex string to byte array

FIRMWARE_VERSION_REQUIRED = "1.4.x" # Make sure the top 2 of 3 numbers match

BP_SPI = spidev.SpiDev()

This file has been truncated. show original

Hope this helps you.

Thank you!