André Esser's PiCameleon, for Multi-Process Raspberry Pi Camera Access, Gains a Client

Developer André Esser has delivered on his promise to make PiCameleon, an interface that expands the capabilities of cameras connected to Raspberry Pi single-board computers, with the release of an easier-to-use client.

The Raspberry Pi Camera Module, and newer High Quality (HQ) Camera Module, are popular accessories for the Raspberry Pi family of single-board computers, but they come with restriction: Only one process can use the camera at a time, meaning that a given process needs to close its access to the camera before another can make use of it.

PiCameleon, unveiled last month, was designed to work around that problem. Sitting between processes and the camera hardware itself, PiCameleon is able to expand the camera to support as many simultaneous processes as the system can run — and even allow up to four different configurations, meaning one process can be capturing high-resolution stills while another is recording lower-resolution video.

"Since some of you really liked it," Esser wrote in response to early feedback on the project's initial release, "I'm thinking of writing a client for it so it is easier to use it."

That client is now available. "I promised to write a client for it," Esser writes in a Reddit post, "so I did. You can install the client with pip3 install picameleon. Please let me know if you like the API and what I could change to support some more features."

PiChameleon itself remains available on the project's GitHub repository under the reciprocal GNU General Public License.