Writing applications for the camera

Now, we will look at a few different possible uses for the camera module and some of the functionality of the picamera library. While this covers the basics of using the module, it may also be worth a look at the library documentation at picamera.readthedocs.org to learn more about the functionality offered by the library.

A time lapse recorder

The first example we will look at is a simple timelapse still recorder. Essentially, all this will do is capture a series of still images with a given delay between each image.

The code for the Python script that will do this is as follows. First, we will import all the libraries and functions that we will use in the script:

import sys
import os
from string import Template
from time import sleep
from threading import Thread
from picamera import PiCamera

Next, we will create a thread class that will perform the still image capture:

class ImageCapture(Thread):
    def __init__(self, filename, resolution=None, delay=1.0...