Camera module, Shopping

ScorPi – pose-able arm for the #RaspberryPi camera module

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Sweetbox II, the perfect case for your Raspberry Pi by Grasping hand » New reward ! ScorPi, a flexible arm for the Raspberry Pi Camera board — Kickstarter

As part of their Sweetbox II Kickstarter, France-based Grasping Hand are offering the “ScorPi” which is a pose-able arm for the Raspberry Pi camera module. It plugs in to the composite video port and then attaches to the camera via one of its mounting holes. It costs £11 delivered (which I guess isn’t bad for a just-launched product) as a pledge to the Kickstarter. I’ve asked if you can get it separately and await a response. This looks like a good way of just holding the camera without too much messing about. Read more/get the ScorPi here

Camera module, Tutorials

Convert #RaspberryPi camera module output to MP4 or FLV

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Once the camera module has captured video, you are left with an raw H264 file. Now, some players can already play this but what you really want to do is convert it to a common format like MP4. (This is actually ‘wrapping’ the H264 output inside an MP4 ‘container’, but we’ll call it conversion…)

First of all, take a video:

raspivid -fps 30 -o raw.h264 -t 20000
This will create a 20 seconds-long video.
Now run the conversion (see the caveat below, though!):
ffmpeg -r 30 -i raw.h264 -vcodec copy converted.mp4

And there you have it – an MP4 file. Now, I’m not convinced that this will produce a standards-compliant MP4. There seems to be some debate about whether you’ll be able to use it, for example, in a video editing package such as Pinnacle, however, the MP4 should play in most video player software and you should be able to upload to YouTube.

You can produce a FLV (or Flash) file by changing ‘converted.mp4’ to ‘converted.flv’.

GPIO boards

RasPi.tv announces RasP.iO add-on board for #RaspberryPi

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RasP.iO Introducing RasPiO® » RasP.iO

Alex Eames, over at RasPi.tv has been celebrating a year of having a Raspberry Pi and blogging about it. Amongst his look back over the year, he has announced what sounds like a really exciting project. He is developing a new expansion board for the Pi called RasPIO which will feature:

  • 8 protected digital IO ports
  • 8 analog inputs
  • 2 analog outputs
  • i2c & uart breakout pins

His plan is to turn it into a tool for education and bundle it with software to make a kind of physical computing toolkit for kids to learn how to interact with their environment using the Pi. You can read a little bit more about the board here.

Read Alex’s look back over the last 12 months