Documentation for the Pi Builder software; see more at https://github.com/publiclab/pi-builder

Using Pi Builder, you can download a premade SD card image to use your Pi as a WiFi streaming camera, a timelapse camera, an Infragram camera, and much more!

Read the introductory blog post here

Pi Builder is used in the following projects:

• Community Microscope Kit
• Lego Spectrometer Kit
• Infragram Pi Camera Kit (above!)

Download

Get the most standard pi-builder SD card image here, which creates a WiFi network called 00-PiCamera with password publiclab, and includes Infragram, Image Sequencer, and camera access (with timelapse):

https://github.com/publiclab/pi-builder/pull/53

Here's a direct link to a recent built image: https://gitlab.com/publiclab/pi-builder/-/jobs/121890022/artifacts/download

Connecting

Once you assemble and plug in your Pi with the provided SD card (or flash your own from one of the recipes here):

1. wait 3-5 minutes for it to start up
2. connect to the 00-PiCamera wifi network with password publiclab
3. wait for the popup prompt, or use Click to log in to this network, or if nothing happens, go to http://pi.local (NOT https, sorry!) and you'll see the welcome page.

If this doesn't work, please post a question below!

Video quality

The streaming video you see in the web interfaces is not the highest quality available; to change it, click Camera settings at the http://pi.local/cam/ page, and change the Wi value to something higher like 1024. It can in theory go as high as 1980, but I think streaming at high framerates at this resolution is probably tough for your Pi.

New recipes

To create a new recipe on Pi Builder, see the GitHub repository (and readme file) here:

https://github.com/publiclab/pi-builder

There you can look at proposed recipes, open an issue, or start developing your own recipe by opening a pull request, which will begin auto-building your image each time you push a commit.

Questions

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Activities