Here
I am continuing my very slow paced building of a Raspberry Pi Zero
based camera. After experimenting with raspberry-desktop file
exchanging I’ve now took some time experimenting with remote
controlling options. I’ll eventually have to wire to the Raspberry
some, at least minimal, physical interface, but remote control,
trough a Android smart-phone, could be a viable solution
to avoid a too
complex hardware interface.
The
ready-made solution: Raspicam Remote
The
first solution I found in Android Play store has been Raspicam
Remote.
Raspicam is a quite simple application providing a simple but
complete user interface and connecting to the Raspberry Pi using
Wi-Fi and SSH.
Unfortunately
Raspicam doesn’t work on my old phone (Jelly bean) but it works
fine in my much newer tablet. I understand you can’t keep backwards
compatibility with everything. Other solutions are available but they
look more suited for remote surveillance than camera interface.
The
mostly Do-it-yourself solution: BlueDot
Interfacing
to the Raspberry trough Wi-Fi offers clear advantages a specially in
terms of connection speed but also poses some disadvantage.
Setting-up a Wi-Fi connection might be trivial while at home where is
available an already configured access point but it’s not the same
while outside. Connecting the Raspberry with a smart-phone using
Wi-Fi means configuring
one of them to act as access-point, its not difficult but it might
become tricky. Also on the power consumption aspect must be kept in
consideration especially for the device acting as access-point.
Bluetooth
overcomes both set-up and power consumption problems in exchange, of
course, for transfer speed and connection range.
Here
comes to play BlueDot:
a simple looking Android application
that together with a easy to use Python library
allows a unidirectional Bluetooth communication between smart-phone
and a Raspberry device.
