Raspberry Pi: first steps with time-lapse photography

A620 powered with CA-PS500

A620 (side view)

I would like to remote control a still camera via gphoto2. After consulting a  list of supported cameras I bought (used) Canon A620 from Allegro (local Internet auction site, sort of E-bay).

This camera has many great features (I suspect even too great as Canon stop producing cheap cameras of this sort): viewfinder, retractable LCD and can be powered with Compact Power Adapter CA-PS500 instead of batteries (an important feature in my project). The plan was simple: connect camera via USB cable to computer and power it with PSU. Capture photos periodically with gphoto2:

 gphoto2 --auto-detect
     
 pi@raspberrystar ~/bin $ gphoto2 --auto-detect
 Model                          Port                                            
 ----------------------------------------------------------
 Canon PowerShot A620 (PTP mode) usb:001,006    

So far, so good.

Now, I tried to capture a photo:

# one shot without flash, download the file and store in a file named as: GPHyyyymmddhhmm.jpg
LANG=C gphoto2 --set-config flashmode=0 --capture-image-and-download --filename "GPH%Y%m%d%H%M.jpg"

As the creation time is wrong (due to camera wrong clock) I modified the above as follows (note that touch is used to adjust file's timestamp):

#!/bin/bash
FILENAME="GPH`date +"%Y%m%d%H%M"`.jpg"

LANG=C gphoto2 --set-config flashmode=0 --capture-image-and-download --filename "$FILENAME"
touch "$FILENAME"

Unfortunately there are problems: I am able to remotely capture only one photo. Next remote capture try results in an error and the camera has to be hard reset (with power on/off button). The problem is reported by others too.

BTW: when I connected the camera to my PC the reliability is much better (but seems not perfect---I experienced camera disconnection too.)

My first try to resolve the problems was to update gphoto2 (raspbian contains version 2.4.14 of gphoto2).

Compiling newest (march 2013) version of gphoto2 on Raspberry Pi

## optionally remove old version (there are no dependencies)
apt-get remove gphoto2

There is no need to remove gphoto2 as compiled one will be installed in another directory (/usr/local/ vs /usr/).

First install/compile the necessary packages:

apt-get install -y libltdl-dev libusb-dev libexif-dev libpopt-dev

## Download and install newer version of libusb 1.0.11
wget http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/libu/libusbx/libusbx_1.0.11.orig.tar.bz2
tar xjvf libusbx_1.0.11.orig.tar.bz2
cd libusbx-1.0.11/

./configure &&  make && sudo make install

## Download and install newer version of libgphoto
wget http://garr.dl.sourceforge.net/project/gphoto/libgphoto/2.5.1.1/libgphoto2-2.5.1.1.tar.bz2
tar xjf libgphoto2-2.5.1.1.tar.bz2
cd libgphoto2-2.5.1.1

./configure &&  make && sudo make install

Download and install newer version of gphoto2

wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/gphoto/gphoto/2.5.1/gphoto2-2.5.1.tar.gz
tar xzvf gphoto2-2.5.1.tar.gz
cd gphoto2-2.5.1

./configure &&  make && sudo make install

## run ldconfig
sudo ldconfig
gphoto2 --version
gphoto2 2.5.1

Copyright (c) 2000-2013 Lutz Mueller i inni

BTW compiling gphoto2 on my fedora 14 box requires to install libtool-ltdl-devel popt-devel first:

#configure: error: cannot compile and link against libltdl
#libgphoto2 requires libltdl (the libtool dl* library),
#but cannot compile and link against it.

yum -y install libtool-ltdl-devel popt-devel

Upon installing above two packages, the compilation of libusb, libgphoto and gphoto2 proceeds smoothly.

Unfortunately installing new version of gphoto2 did not help.

The problem will be further examined...