Raspicam on Picore 11betab

[RockJamm]

Hi,

Very recent convert to PiCore here hoping to get the standard raspberry pi camera stuff working for monitoring of wildlife.  I notice ffmpeg is already so that's an excellent start. 
I appreciate this may not be very high on anyone else's list of priorities however I am prepared to do some learning and put in some time (however I do have a job and a family so that's not endless).

I'm pretty sure there is no extension (think that's the correct term - please correct me if not) currently existing for this and I'm wondering whether there is a process documented anywhere for getting something available in, let's say, Raspbian and modifying it so that it works in PiCore?

I have a programming background and some experience of Linux.  Any suggestions as to where I should start?  If this is a sensible way to go then I could contribute other extensions too I guess.

[Paul_123]

Camera stuff should be in the rpi-vc.tcz extension.

Which I see is not currently in the 11.x extension.   You can get it from the 10.x repo until someone copies it over.

There is alot of info in the FAQ's and wiki's on how things are handled.   Most extensions are compiled from source.   The rpi-vc is not, it is just copied from the rpi firmware github and packaged.

[Juanito]

Is it still the case that rpi-vc is required - I thought I'd read that with the latest mesa and full kms, it was no longer required - or am I mixing two different things?

As a side issue libEGL.so, libGLESv2.so and libGLESv1_CM.so are duplicated in other extensions.

[Paul_123]

perhaps the graphics side handled elsewhere, but the camera support needs separate binaries.   And there are other things in there too,   vcgencmd, tvservice,.......

Perhaps we need to separate rpi-vc a bit further.

[RockJamm]

Many thanks I'll investigate today and see where I get to.  Really appreciate your thoughts.

[Juanito]

I did some testing without the rpi-vc extension.

The v4l-dvb-KERNEL extension was missing some modules, which have now been added.

First add a couple of lines to /mnt/mmcblk0p1/config.txt such that:

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$ cat /mnt/mmcblk0p1/config.txt
...
[ALL]
# Enable camera
start_x=1
gpu_mem=128..and reboot

Then load the required extensions:

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$ tce-load -i libv4l2
$ sudo modprobe bcm2835-unicam
To take a photo:

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$ v4l2-ctl --overlay=1 [enable viewfinder]
$ v4l2-ctl --set-fmt-video=width=2592,height=1944,pixelformat=3
$ v4l2-ctl --stream-mmap=3 --stream-count=1 --stream-to=photo.jpg
To record a video:

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$ v4l2-ctl --overlay=1 [enable viewfinder]
$ v4l2-ctl --set-fmt-video=width=1920,height=1088,pixelformat=4
$ v4l2-ctl --stream-mmap=3 --stream-count=100 --stream-to=video.264..adjust stream count for a longer video

[Juanito]

rpi-vc copied to the piCore-11.x repos - things seem to work, but care will need to be taken to avoid a clash with libEGL and friends.

[RockJamm]

FANTASTIC!  many thanks

[Paul_123]

Couple of interesting posts about the camera that I've not seen.....

https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/an-open-source-camera-stack-for-raspberry-pi-using-libcamera/

And a FAQ to go with it.   https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=43&t=273018

Note that currently the piCore11 is using the 4.19 kernel tree, so libcamera is not going to work, but I think the data paths with respect to v4l2 are similar.   raspivid and raspistill are still going to be around.

[RockJamm]

The libcamera stuff is very interesting thanks Paul.  I'm having a bit of trouble getting things working but I think that's more to do with me not having got my head around persistence of the config.txt that anything else.  When i've worked it out I'll feed back.   

[Juanito]

Video motion detection extension, motion, added to the repo - tested with an RPi3 and RPi camera using the default (v4l2) motion conf files 

Note that motion would not compile against rpi-vc mmal - it looks like it needs an update?

[RockJamm]

Once I'd worked out I had to mount mmcblk0p1 in order to edit config.txt camera works fine!  Many thanks all.  Really pleased.  What a great project this is!

[RockJamm]

Looks like vlc isn't available at the moment - is that likely to be added to the repository?  Having investigated a bit further it looks like that is more helpful to me than FFmpeg and V4L2 (or raspivid) | vlc is likely to be the way i go.

[Paul_123]

Note that motion would not compile against rpi-vc mmal - it looks like it needs an update?

mmal looks like it has had 2 updates since the Rpi4 launch.   I'll update the package tonight.

[Juanito]

What does vlc provide that the others don't?