Libcamera and Reterminal

Products & Technology Single Board Computers
#1

Hi
Does anyone have libcamera working on reterminal? I have loaded libcamera because raspistill does not support a preview window.

Thanks

#2

I have used both raspistill and libcamera. Not 100% sure I’ve done both on reTerminal, but it should be same the as any Raspberry Pi.

To use libcamera you need two things:

  1. Change /boot/config.txt to turn over control of the camera pipeline to the ARM processor instead of MMAL. For example:
    dtoverlay=imx219
    Nowadays you can also let it autodetect which camera is connected.
  2. You need to install the software. You can have both raspistill/raspivid software and libcamera software installed at the same time. But only one will work depending on your /boot/config.txt

I also want to mention a couple of gotchas that I have encountered.
The raspistill (MMAL) camera tools do not work on 64-bit OS currently.
Starting with Bullseye (11) only libcamera is supported.
Getting a preview to show on the reTerminal LCD is not so simple (impossible maybe). It is not the same as on an normal HDMI display.

#3

Thanks for your response,I have done a lot of work on the subject. I agree with you that the display may stop the use of libcamera.

#4

Normally the preview is output directly from the VideoCore to the display.
It is possible to get a preview through software with --qt-preview. That should work on the LCD, at the cost of high CPU load.

I haven’t tried this on the reTerminal, but I have been able to use --qt-preview and X11 forwarding to see the live preview remotely on my Mac.