Topic: Raspberry Pi camera settings or ...?

[pjon]

I'm running WeeWX on a raspberry pi connected to a FineOffset WH1080 and would like to add a webcam snapshot to my weather page. I added a Raspberry Pi NoIR camera to the pi and set up the pi to take an image once every 5 minutes. So far, so good.

My NoIR version of the Pi Camera has no infra-red filter built in and comes with bit of filter material to insert into a case (ordered, hasn't arrived yet). The attachments show the difference between filtered and unfiltered views. (See also: https://raspi.tv/2013/pinoir-whats-it-for-comparison-of-raspicam-and-pi-noir-output-in-daylight

I tried adjusting the saturation which one can do with a command line, like so

$ v4l2-ctl -c saturation=XX

but found the results disappointing.

I noticed that some other webcam programs allowed one to tweak hue, saturation and white balance interactively and I tried out cheese, camerama, gucvview and webcamoid in quick succession, with an old USB Logitech camera plugged in and entering

-d=/dev/video1

on the command line. I didn't succeed in getting what I hoped for: a live feed that would let me tweak the parameters I could then use with the raspistill image capture program. I think the problem was somehow related to the programs defaulting to the default video device at /dev/video0 device, I'm not really sure.

I'm wondering

1. If there are any settings for the Pi camera that will give me a decent image, colorwise
2. What software I can use play with the settings and what I have to do to give it access to /dev/video0

The images at the link above on the raspi.tv site do not show the corrected (filtered) NoIR image. In principle I understand that the NoIR plus the filter should be similar to the filtered image, but so far I have't seen green fields looking green. Wondering if anyone else has had to fiddle to get this working? If so, how?

I have a PoE Ethernet switch in my attic and a spare Ethernet cable run to a box outside the house where I could mount a camera looking in the same direction as the Pi camera and if I can't get good enough pics with the Pi camera that is something I'll want to try (I have a webcam and PVR in place and ran a spare cable which I could use for this).

However, something I don't know and would welcome advice on is: assuming I want an image of, say, 640x480, for the purposes of a weather page photo, is there any merit in capturing with a camera capable of a higher resolution and adjusting either via downsizing or at capture, or is a lower resolution camera adequate? In essence, is a reduced hi-res image any better than a lower res image? Or does it depend on the camera?

If a cheap FTP capable camera with PoE support would suffice and free up a raspberry pi ... recommendations welcome! Thanks

Below: unfiltered and filtered images with the raspberry pi NoIR camera; fields are green in real life.

 [ You are not allowed to view attachments ]  [ You are not allowed to view attachments ]

[PacoJavi]

Can I ask...Why don't you try a normal raspicam? I have 2 of them and I'm very pleased with the results.

In relation to the quality, those 2 pictures have a resolution of 1600x900 pixels, but to reduce their file size I have set up the quality in the raspistill script to just 20. This allows me to open the pictures in a new window in the browser and still have a more than decent detail, so I think that having a camera with a higher resolution serving the purpose of a weather cam doesn't mean much.

[pjon]

I have since acquired a normal raspicam -- it arrived this morning. In fact, it's a replacement for one I bought earlier and which seemed to be defective. It was detected ok but raspistill's output ended with

Camera control callback  cmd=0x4f525245mmal: No data received from sensor. Check all connections, including the Sunny one on the camera board

(same on both Pi2 and Pi3; my NoIR worked on both).

Basically, I made the mistake of thinking that the NoIR + filter would be equivalent to the normal camera. Not as far as I could see. The NoIR is now doing duty in the chicken coop  [ You are not allowed to view attachments ]
and also serves as a backup DNS server.

VGA will do for my weather page--was just wondering whether reduction on capture or afterwards would make any difference. Am not planning to make it a clickable image with more detail. After experimenting with the NoIR camera I have settled for now on reducing image size at capture rather than afterwards. It seems to rescale without loss of detail, unlike many of the capture modes at different (non-default) resolutions.

Are you using a case with the camera? I bought one but find it poorly designed and a bit of a faff; need to find a better one.

[PacoJavi]

The one I have in Spain is inside the raspi case along with the raspberry. The one in Cork has no case, I have it indoors stuck to the wall with velcro.
However I found recently that the cases that come with the SD cards are just perfect in size for the raspicam.