Notices

Ladoga asked me for a way to take timed photos with rawcam.

My idea for this was quite different. I imagined an application where you could program exactly the timing, not only of the photos, but of the actions during the photos. For example you could program it to open the shutter, fire the flash 3 times quickly, then focus closer fire the flash again and close the shutter. I experimented a bit with boost.python and managed to make a binary which, while it does control the camera (I can hear the lens) it hangs without much info of what is happening.

So for now I have settled with a much more low-tech solution. I made a simple command line camera which can be controlled with your plain old shell scripts (or timed, or python) to take photos with whatever settings you pass as parameters.

Of course you'll need developer mode to run it. Ignore the origin complaint aegis will spit out during installation and run it in a develsh shell as user.

Available parameters
There is no automatic exposure/focus (maybe sometime I may do that)

Download here http://maemo.qwazix.com/cmdCam/

Please share your scripts below. I will provide an example template for sharing scripts in the second post so that are easy to use.

Script sharing template
this is not an actual working script

Timelapse script for capturing sunset

Scene
Script

I used fixed origin to install it and that allows it to be run as user without having to use develsh.

Thanks for this qwazix!

That does sound great :-) Could you add one more param for the filename of the pic?

Scriptable camera, so much better than I could imagine.

Thank you so much.

@caveman, there is a --path parameter to choose the directory I just forgot to document it. It does not specify filename though. I can do that but I won't implement a mechanism to auto-increment. You'll have to do that in your script.

The --path param is fine, it solves the problem.

I just ran my first test:
It just worked :-) Each pic takes about 4-5s. So to take 10 pics 1 min apart from each other, one could just use
Cool!

Just some quick observations on cmdcam 0.0.1

--exposure [microseconds] gets ignored, but --shutter [microseconds] works and does the same.
--focus [meters] doesn't work and is always at closest range.
--whitebalance [Kelvins] works as expected.
--flash works as expected.

Maybe others can corfirm this or tell me if I'm doing something wrong. Basically I just use --focus flag with numerical value in meters, for example:
--focus 15 or --focus 0.5, but the resulting focus is always ca. 15cm from the lens.

Additional questions/requests:
1. Is it possible to take consecutive shots any faster? I know this isn't a DSLR, but 4-5 seconds minimum between shots is somewhat limiting.

2. You might consider creating symlink for /opt/cmdCam/bin/cmdCam to /usr/local/bin or elsewhere in user's $PATH so that it isn't necessary to type the whole path. Also in the same vein you could make the name fully lowercase for usabilitys sake. (though user can easily do these by him/herself too...so it's not a huge issue.)

I already noticed that cmdCam is very good for sharp long exposure shots in the dark. No camera shake. (as long as object is ca. 15cm away from the lens, due to focus issue)

Anyway. Thanks for this. Maybe you can squash the focus bug when you have some spare time.

Thanks for reporting and sorry for being late, 0.0.2 fixes the focus bug and makes the flash stronger, 0.0.3 has a --size argument to control the photo sizes, it takes S M L XL, defaults to L.

for the curious