🎈 Public Lab: How do you get the red LED on the pi camera to turn off?

Question: How do you get the red LED on the pi camera to turn off?

by zixaq | September 03, 2018 18:35 | #17046

I've got my lego spec assembled and (finally) was able to boot it up and try it out. I don't have any experience with raspberry pi and limited experience in linux, so I'm kind of a newbie here. Google brings up a config edit that is supposed to disable the camera LED, but the fix isn't working for me (adding disable_camera_LED=1 to the boot config).

I get spectra, but there's also a substantial amount of red glare from the LED that I'd like to get rid of.

I'd normally just fuss with it myself in free time, but I'm hoping to get this together for a classroom experiments in a week or two.

4 Comments

Hey! Welcome to public Lab! Could you post the guide that you're following, and the config file in question?

I'm not personally familiar with the webcam, but I have used Linux quite a bit. Maybe I, or someone else here, can help.

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There are a handful that all say the same thing when I search for "disable pi camera led":

First up, we need to edit the config file.

sudo nano /boot/config.txt


Add the following line to the end of the file, then save it.

disable_camera_led=1


Next up, reboot your Raspberry Pi.

sudo reboot

I've done this much with no effect. The only possibilities I can think of are 1) this is a newer camera/raspberry that this doesn't work with (raspberry pi zero that came with the PL spec lego kit) or 2) is the text in the config.txt file case sensitive?

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aha, I guess I'm wondering if it's possible to just tape over the red LED -- but in future versions we can integrate that setting for sure -- we'll be using this library to generate new images for the spectrometer, so do you think you could open an issue for "disabling the LED" here? https://github.com/publiclab/image-builder-rpi/issues

On Tue, Sep 4, 2018 at 6:45 AM \<notifications@publiclab.org> wrote:

Public Lab contributor zixaq just asked a question entitled ' How do you get the red LED on the pi camera to turn off?':

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I've got my lego spec assembled and (finally) was able to boot it up and try it out. I don't have any experience with raspberry pi and limited experience in linux, so I'm kind of a newbie here. Google brings up a config edit that is supposed to disable the camera LED, but the fix isn't working for me (adding disable_camera_LED=1 to the boot config).

I get spectra, but there's also a substantial amount of red glare from the LED that I'd like to get rid of.

I'd normally just fuss with it myself in free time, but I'm hoping to get this together for a classroom experiments in a week or two.

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Hi @zixaq I've done this before using Raspberry pi 2b and the original raspberry pi camera V2. What I've found is this: 1. Some people recommend to update the system using the command "sudo rpi-update" in terminal. 2. Some clone cameras use the line of code of the led for "other purposes" and rpi people says in some forums that can't be solved but as I understand your camera is raspberry pi v1.3 so this shoud not be the problem.

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