Allowing for client operations from one of the pis in array

[m-dorfman]

Probably not an issue, wasn't sure where to post... Apologies if this is in the way.

I'm attempting to setup an array of pi cameras, and have one of the camera/pi units act as a control master, while still acting as a camera to synchronously take photos with the other units.
Is it possible to get client like functionality on one of the pis?

[waveform80]

No prob - the client should run happily on Raspbian. The command line client should "just work" - just install the compoundpi-client package and you'll have it. The GUI might require more work - it's fairly untested. Unfortunately the only version in the Raspbian repo at the moment is 0.3 which is woefully out of date and has a few bugs - I'm trying to finish off 0.4, and it's nearly done but I've no idea when I'm going to find time to polish it off and package it up at the moment.

[m-dorfman]

Thank you! If it can take photos synchronously, then it's good enough for my purposes.
One other item, is there some sort of image name control? I need to be able to grab images by the time and which camera they were taken, I was hoping to have images named by a string variable that is updated through a loop using python's datetime.

[waveform80]

At the moment I think the command line and GUI clients don't provide any means of configuring the output filename - they simply use the IP address and capture time of the image (which should fit your purposes still). Using the batch client in 0.4 (not yet released, but close) you can name the outputs whatever you like as you'd be creating the files and just asking the client to write data into them.

[waveform80]

Okay, 0.4 is out now (though it'll take a few days for it to hit the Raspbian repos). Still, I've had the opportunity to test using a Pi as the client. I'm happy to report it works nicely with the command line client (cpi), the GUI client (cpigui), and the batch client. Once it hits the Raspbian repos it should be as simple as installing the compoundpi-client package with apt-get as usual (in the meantime you can try installing it via PyPI, but the dependencies, especially the PyQt dependency for the GUI, can be annoyingly difficult unless you know what you're doing).

[m-dorfman]

Oh man, thanks!
I started editing the version 0.3 software to allow me to get file name control to grab info from a thermal controller and allow me to grab data from an external temperature controller.
I'll go ahead and set this up, and hopefully not fall into a dependency hell of sorts.
Thanks again for all your help!