First Light

First light is a term they use in astronomy when a telescope is first used (to gather light). I'm borrowing that term for the first use of my Pi cam. Yesterday, I set up my shared ssh connection so I'm not remotely logging in with my mac book pro now. I've disconnected the keyboard, mouse, and monitor (hdmi). I now have just the USB Wi-Fi adapter occupying the sole onboard USB port.

After powering down, I installed the camera's ribbon cable (which is very delicate) and enabled the camera in raspi-config as the documentation directs. By default, when you enable the camera, the system will allocate 128MB of memory to GPU for the camera. The Raspbian OS comes with 3 programs for operating the camera: raspistill (for still images), raspivid (for videos),  and raspistillyuv (for still images, but without encoding). My first test failed because I didn't have the ribbon cable seated completely. Once I re-seated it and powered back up, I commanded a still and video image and copied them to my mac for convenient viewing. Here is the still image:

First still from the Raspbery Pi 5MP camera module attached to Model A

The video is h264 encoded and must be converted to as suitable format like mp4, so I installed gpac using apt-get on the Pi and converted it to .mp4. In it's temporary state, the Pi is sandwiched between some foam packing to protected it and give the camera a temporary place to rest.

Pi sandwich

With the small size of this package, I'm thinking of even more ways to use it...