README.md

libcamera and libcamera-apps installation for Raspberry Pi

Preparing your Pi

Your Raspberry Pi should be running the latest version of the Raspberry Pi OS (Buster at the time of writing), and the camera and I2C interfaces must both be enabled (check the Interfaces tab of the Raspberry Pi Configuration tool, from the Preferences menu). First ensure your system, firmware and all its applications and repositories are up to date by entering the following commands into a terminal window.

sudo apt update
sudo apt full-upgrade

libcamera is under active development which sometimes means that new features need to be supported in Raspberry Pi OS, even before they are officially released. Therefore we currently recommend updating to the latest release candidate. To do this, first reboot your Pi, and then use

sudo rpi-update

WARNING: Note that the release candidate is not as thoroughly tested as an official release. If your Raspberry Pi contains important or critical data we would strongly advise that it is backed up first, or that a fresh SD card is used for the purpose of trying libcamera.

Next, the /boot/config.txt file must be updated to load and use the camera driver, by adding the following to the bottom.

dtoverlay=imx219

If you are using a sensor other than the imx219 you will need to supply the alternative name here (for example, ov5647 for the V1 camera, or imx477 for the HQ Cam).

NOTE: after rebooting, control of the camera system will be passed to the ARM cores, and firmware-based camera functions (such as raspistill and so forth) will no longer work. Setting /boot/config.txt back and rebooting will restore the previous behaviour.

Building libcamera and qcam

The build system and runtime environment of libcamera have a number of dependencies. They can be installed with the following commands.

sudo apt install libboost-dev
sudo apt install libgnutls28-dev openssl libtiff5-dev
sudo apt install qtbase5-dev libqt5core5a libqt5gui5 libqt5widgets5
sudo apt install meson
sudo pip3 install pyyaml ply

The Qt libraries are only required for libcamera's qcam demo app.

Unfortunately, at the time of writing, the default version of meson is a little old, so please execute:

sudo pip3 install --upgrade meson

We can now check out the code and build libcamera as follows.

git clone git://linuxtv.org/libcamera.git
cd libcamera
meson build
cd build
meson configure -Dpipelines=raspberrypi -Dtest=false
cd ..
ninja -C build
sudo ninja -C build install

At this stage you may wish to check that qcam works. Type build/src/qcam/qcam and check that you see a camera image.

Note

On some lower memory platforms (e.g. 1GB) there have been cases of ninja exhausting all the system memory and aborting (as it will attempt to use all the CPU cores). If this happens, please try replacing ninja -C build by ninja -C build -j 2 - this will restrict Ninja to only 2 cores.

Raspberry Pi's libcamera-apps

Raspberry Pi's libcamera-apps provide very similar functionality to the raspistill and raspivid applications that use the proprietary firmware-based camera stack. To build them, we must first install libepoxy.

cd
sudo apt install libegl1-mesa-dev
git clone https://github.com/anholt/libepoxy.git
cd libepoxy
mkdir _build
cd _build
meson
ninja
sudo ninja install

Finally we can build the libcamera-apps.

cd
sudo apt install cmake libboost-program-options-dev libdrm-dev libexif-dev
git clone https://github.com/raspberrypi/libcamera-apps.git
cd libcamera-apps
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make -j4

To check everything is working correctly, type ./libcamera-hello - you should see a preview window displayed for about 5 seconds.

Further Documentation

You can find out more in the Raspberry Pi Camera Algorithm and Tuning Guide, here.

More information on the libcamera-apps is available here.

Information on writing your own kernel modules to support new CSI-2 cameras and bridge chips can be found here.