capture

A Raspberry Pi camera server. Originally built for the SirkPlast 2026 project (NTNU) to photograph microplastic filter samples, but usable as a general single-process camera server for any Raspberry Pi + camera module.

A FastAPI server that runs in a single process on the Pi and lets you:

• view a live preview from the camera
• take photos that are saved with a timestamp
• download individual photos, or select several and download them together as a zip

1. Quick install

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Senamjya/capture/main/setup.sh | bash

2. Running the server

Navigate to the folder

cd capture/

Option A - run detached with tmux (recommended)

Starts the server in a background tmux session:

./start.sh                # start in the background
./stop.sh                 # stop it
tmux attach -t capture    # watch it live (Ctrl-b then d to detach)

Option B - run in the foreground

Handy for quick testing; stops when you close the terminal:

uv run uvicorn app:app --host 0.0.0.0 --port 8080

From a device connected to the same network navigate to the network address in your browser.

Replace all the x values with the output of the hostname -I command:

http://xxx.xxx.xx.xxx:8080/

Config

Variable	Default	Description
CAPTURE_DIR	captures	Folder where photos are saved
CAPTURE_WIDTH	4056	Width of saved photos (full sensor resolution)
CAPTURE_HEIGHT	3040	Height of saved photos (full sensor resolution)
PREVIEW_WIDTH	1920	Width of the live preview (lores stream)
PREVIEW_HEIGHT	1080	Height of the live preview (lores stream)
THUMB_SIZE	640	Longest edge (px) of gallery thumbnails
THUMB_QUALITY	80	JPEG quality of thumbnails (1–95)
FRAMERATE	50	Frames per second in the stream
HFLIP	1	Flip horizontally (0/1)
VFLIP	1	Flip vertically (0/1)

API

Route	Method	Description
/	GET	Web page with preview, capture and gallery
/stream	GET	Live MJPEG preview
/capture	POST	Take a photo
/api/images	GET	JSON list of all photos
/images/{name}	GET	View one photo (full resolution)
/thumbs/{name}	GET	View thumbnail (640px, cached in the browser)
/download/{name}	GET	Download one photo
/download-zip	POST	Download several photos together ({"names": [...]})

License

Copyright 2026 Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See LICENSE for details and NOTICE for attribution.