We have successfully taken still shots with the camera. The next step is to write a Python script to take these shots for us. We will add motion detection in later...
Raspbian comes with Python preinstalled - simply Click Menu -> Programming -> Python 3. This will open a "Python Shell" which you can directly type Python into: Such as:
print("hello world")
Rather than typing directly into the shell however, Press Ctrl-N to start a new window. Type the code below into the window that pops up, and then save the file as wildlife-cam.py to your home directory or to your desktop if you prefer.
#!/usr/bin/python
print("hello world")
Open a terminal window, navigate to the folder where you saved the file (E.g. cd ~' to go home, or cd ~/Desktopto go to the desktop). Then typechmod +x wildlife-cam.pyto make the script executable. Then type./wildlife-cam.pyto run your script and you should seehello world` printed to the terminal.
To take photos with the camera, we need to install a python library as follows:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python3-picamera
Back in the Python editor, replace the hello world example with the following code:
#!/usr/bin/python
import picamera
camera = picamera.PiCamera()
camera.capture('image.jpg')
Run your script by typing ./wildlife-cam.py
This will take a new still image via a Python script. The next step will be to add in some motion detection.