Camera Class

Capturing from a camera object

In the cases of both a Raspberry Pi Streaming Camera, and a Mock Camera (attached if no real camera can be found), the camera’s capture method takes as it’s first positional argument either a string describing a file path to save to, or any Python file-like object.

The openflexure_microscope.camera.capture.CaptureObject class works by providing a file path string, but adds additional functionality around storing and retreiving EXIF metadata in compatible files.

If, for your application, you do not require this functionality, you can pass a simple string or file-like object. For example, to take an image that will be stored in-memory, processed rapidly, and then discarded, you could use a BytesIO stream:

import io
from PIL import Image
...

with microscope.camera.lock, io.BytesIO() as stream:

    microscope.camera.capture(
        stream,
        use_video_port=True,
        bayer=False,
    )

    stream.seek(0)
    image = Image.open(stream)