Connect High Quality Camera

[josephagoss]

Is it possible to get a nice standalone camera and connect it to the Raspberry Pi for control? I want to build a physical interface that consists of a camera and a button, push the button and the camera records you and stores it on a hard disk (Probably one of those 1TB external USB powered Hdd)

The thing is I want the footage to be really good, so I either need to hook up a standalone camera that has a API (do those exist?) or get a really high quality web cam with maybe a light that turns on too

is it possible to add external cameras to the Pi? I can program but I can't write device drivers.

Any ideas?

Thanks

[jamesh]

We will be releasing a bolt on camera for the raspberry pi. It will be 5MP stills, and will also encode 1080p30 video in H264.

We HOPE to release before Xmas, but there quite a bit of work to do. The board works but there is software to write.

Checkout the CSI camera forum for more information.

[f32mark]

In the meantime, you can control a DSLR with gphoto2 if you want to try things out. I can control a canon 60D to take high quality still or HD video shots.

[SN]

I've done the same with gphoto2 - currently only with a cheapo Nikon to prove the concept so far - its a bit of a revelation being able to take photos in shell script whenever/however you like

depending on your camera api capabilities gphoto2 can exert all sorts of control over the camera

see http://gphoto.org/proj/libgphoto2/support.php and http://www.teaser.fr/~hfiguiere/linux/digicam.html for details

[jamesh]

We will be releasing a bolt on camera for the raspberry pi. It will be 5MP stills, and will also encode 1080p30 video in H264.

We HOPE to release before Xmas, but there quite a bit of work to do. The board works but there is software to write.

Checkout the CSI camera forum for more information.

Sorry, looks like Xmas is not possible now. Going to be a couple of months at least. Lots of testing to do, HW and SW.