Raspicam PHP

, _(*1)

Raspicam PHP is a library to control the Raspberry Pi Camera Module with PHP. It is a wrapper around the command line tool raspistill., _(*2)

Requirements

You need a Raspberry Pi running Raspbian and the Camera Module. On the Raspberry Pi you also need to have PHP and composer installed., _(*3)

First, install and enable the Camera on the Raspberry Pi: Instructions, _(*4)

If you don't have PHP installed on the Raspberry Pi yet, you can install it by running:, _(*5)

sudo apt-get install php5

Then install composer:, _(*6)

curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
sudo mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer

Install

First check requirements above., _(*7)

Install with composer:, _(*8)

composer require cvuorinen/raspicam-php

Add to your php file (adjust path accordingly if file not in project root):, _(*9)

require 'vendor/autoload.php';

Usage

Take picture

use Cvuorinen\Raspicam\Raspistill;

$camera = new Raspistill();

$camera->takePicture('pic.jpg');

Fluent interface

use Cvuorinen\Raspicam\Raspistill;

$camera = new Raspistill();
$camera->timeout(1)
    ->rotate(90)
    ->exposure(Raspistill::EXPOSURE_NIGHT)
    ->quality(85);

$camera->takePicture('pic.jpg');

Constructor options array

use Cvuorinen\Raspicam\Raspistill;

$camera = new Raspistill([
    'timeout' => 1,
    'rotate' => 90,
    'exposure' => Raspistill::EXPOSURE_NIGHT,
    'quality' => 85,
]);

$camera->takePicture('pic.jpg');

Timelapse

use Cvuorinen\Raspicam\Raspistill;

$camera = new Raspistill();

// take picture every ten seconds for two minutes
$camera->startTimelapse('image%04d.jpg', 10, 120);

More complex examples can be found in the examples directory., _(*10)

Documentation

Documentation can be found in the the docs directory., _(*11)

Troubleshooting

Since Raspicam PHP is just a wrapper around raspistill, you should first make sure that it works without issues. This can be done by calling it directly, for example creating a PHP script with just passthru("raspistill -o /tmp/test.jpg"); and calling it the same way as the script that uses Raspicam PHP., _(*12)

Depending on how you are going to execute your PHP code, you might have to adjust some permissions. The executing user needs access to /dev/vchiq on the Pi. If you are executing from command-line as the default user, it should just work., _(*13)

If you are executing through a web server like Apache, you need to adjust the permissions so that the web server user (www-data in case of Apache) has permission to access it by adding the user to the group video (with e.g. sudo usermod -a -G video www-data)., _(*14)

Also make sure that the user has permission to write to the file/directory where you are saving the images. The filename is relative to PHP current working directory, but absolute paths can also be used., _(*15)