Hi! friends, Raspberry Pi boards come with a lot of powerful features like an 8MP camera with video streaming capabilities. OpenCv can help us alot in properly utilizing these capabilities for a plethora of amazing applications. So, if you have just bought your Raspberry Pi board especially the Raspberry Pi Zero then all you need is to set it up for SSH.
You may skip this step, if you already have an accessible Rasbperry Pi to SSH.
Fresh installation of Raspberry Pi OS
- Insert the SD card (better > 8GB size) into an USB card reader and plug it to your Computer (any of Mac OS, Windows and Ubuntu/Linux).
- Go to the official link to download the Raspberry Pi Imager https://www.raspberrypi.org/software/
- It is really quick and easy to install. You can watch the 3-steps here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J024soVgEeM
- Take out and again insert the USB card reader to your PC. This time you will see that the USB device name has changed to Boot.
- Open the device and find the
config.txtfile, open it in a text editor, go to the last line, press enter and add thisdtoverlay=dwc2after the last line, and save it. - In the device find the
cmdline.txtfile and add between two spaces thismodules-load=dwc2,g_ether, right after therootwait, then save and close this .txt as well. - Make an empty file in notepad and save it as
sshand remove the .txt in the name. This fill should exist in the same place asconfig.txtandcmdline.txt. - Thats it! now remove the SD card and insert it into the Rasbperry Pi SD card slot properly.
- Simply plug the USB data cable to your Raspberry Pi card and connect it to the computer. The computer will also provide the power to your card, so no need to insert the power cable.
- Upon connection the Windows OS will detect a new LAN device, wait for it to be installed and then we need Bonjour.
- Go to this link, download and install Bonjour https://support.apple.com/kb/dl999?locale=en_GB
- In the Device Properties of Windows OS, find the USB Serial Port and provide it the drivers from this link USB Ethernet Drivers: https://wiki.moddevices.com/wiki/Troubleshooting_Windows_Connection
- After that you can view in the device in the Network and Sharing connections. The device is ready to SSH!
Acess Raspberry Pi OS using SSH
Our Raspberry Pi board is now configured for the SSH access and its Network device is ready. We can now use two ways to access it:
- By installing Putty software: https://www.putty.org/
- By installing Bitvise client software: https://www.bitvise.com/ssh-client-download
- We recommend Bitvise anyway, but in both cases we require the Host, Port, Username and the Password to access the Pi.
- By default: Host is
raspberrypi.local, Port is22, Username ispi, and Password israspberry, enter these values in the GUI and hit Login. - Once login, you can now visualize
pi@raspberrypi:~ $in the Command or Terminal window, enterlsto view your files. Now that we are able to access the PI, the next step is to enable its wifi so that we can download the opencv using a pip installer.
Again you may skip this step if you can access the PI using SSH and your wifi is enabled.
Update the Raspberry Pi OS
- After the
pi@raspberrypi:~ $in the Terminal window, we can writesudo raspi-configand hit enter to open the configuration window as below:
│ 1 System Options Configure system settings │
│ 2 Display Options Configure display settings │
│ 3 Interface Options Configure connections to peripherals │
│ 4 Performance Options Configure performance settings │
│ 5 Localisation Options Configure language and regional settings │
│ 6 Advanced Options Configure advanced settings │
│ 8 Update Update this tool to the latest version │
│ 9 About raspi-config Information about this configuration tool |
Note that you can go back in this window by pressing Esc key.
- Select
1 System Optionsusing the arrow keys and press Enter - Now select the Wireless LAN, and Enter the Wifi SSID and the Password and press Enter
| S1 Wireless LAN Enter SSID and passphrase │ │ S2 Audio Select audio out through HDMI or 3.5mm jack │ │ S3 Password Change password for the 'pi' user │ │ S4 Hostname Set name for this computer on a network │ │ S5 Boot / Auto Login Select boot into desktop or to command line │ │ S6 Network at Boot Select wait for network connection on boot │ │ S7 Splash Screen Choose graphical splash screen or text boot │ │ S8 Power LED Set behaviour of power LED |This will enable the Wifi access of Raspberry Pi board to the internet.
- Once the wifi access is enable, after the
pi@raspberrypi:~ $in the Terminal window, we need to update the system by using following commands:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
- It may take a while depending on your speed of the internet.
Please note that in the latest Pi operating systems the Python2 and Python3 are already installed.
Using pip easily install the OpenCV
Although this method is way too simple, yet it still requires some dependencies to install as shown below.
sudo apt-get install libhdf5-dev libhdf5-serial-dev
sudo apt-get install python3-h5py
sudo apt-get install libqtgui4 libqtwebkit4 libqt4-test python3-pyqt5
sudo apt-get install libatlas-base-dev
sudo apt-get install libjasper-dev
sudo apt-get install -y libatlas-base-dev libhdf5-dev libhdf5-serial-dev libatlas-base-dev libjasper-dev libqtgui4 libqt4-test
Now simply install the opencv using Python3 as below:
sudo pip3 install opencv-contrib-python==3.4.4.19
To check if OpenCV is correctly installed, simply type python3 in the terminal window and then
import cv2
If no error appears, that means your cv2 is ready to be used. If you have any questions or suggestions, please ask in the comments below. Cheers and have a nice day!