Raspberry Pi Forums

Hi,

Our School's Astro Pi is built and tested, and our coding team are all very excited about starting to code their experiment.

One detail remains elusive, though: Does anyone know the orientation of the camera on-board the ISS? In other words, how do the students complete the line camera.rotation(???) in their program?

I know we could rotate the images afterwards, but it seems like it'd be nice to get this right on-board. I've got a line cued up and waiting for the right integer, but despite reading the forums, FAQ, code guide and comp rules I don't seem to be able to spot the answer.

Best,

Stephen

Hi Stephen

So the camera is sideways in the case due to the length of the ribbon cable - if you hold the Astro Pi case looking at the camera with LED hole in the top right - this is the default "up" orientation for the camera.

If you change the desktop background on your Astro Pi you should find, at the top of the list, some pictures of the Astro Pi units - one of these shows Astro Pi IR (Izzy) mounted on the Node 2 nadir hatch window. So in that picture, "up" is towards the right.

There are some previous Astro Pi Earth Observation images which you can look at here. If you download a few of these and flick through them you'll be able to see the direction the ground moves past the window. I personally don't think the camera orientation makes much of a difference when you're looking straight down with the Earth filling the image - but that should allow you to make a decision about which orientation you want.

Here's the documentation for the Pi Camera rotation function.

Many thanks

Dave