How remove camera preview to raspberry pi

Question

I installed the SimpleCv on my raspberryPi and the driver to use the camera board with it (uv4l driver) and now I'd like to play with it. When I type on simpleCV shell "Camera(0).getImage().save("foo.jpg") " , on the screen appears the camera preview and I am not able to type other command because this preview covers the shell What Have I to do to remove the camera preview ? Thanks a lot ! Filippo

Answer 1

Try the nopreview option

pkill uv4l
uv4l --driver raspicam --auto-video_nr --encoding yuv420 --width 320 --height 240 --nopreview
export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/uv4l/uv4lext/armv6l/libuv4lext.so

Hope that helps

Answer 2

The RasPi camera is more integrated than a standard plug-play webcamera, and as a result, I haven't had much sucess using simpleCV's camera functions. Instead I use a simple python script that I call prior to running my simpleCV analysis that grabs an image and saves it to the disk

import subprocess

imgName = '/home/pi/blahblah.jpg'

def takePicture(imgName):
    subprocess.call('raspistill -n -t 1 -o %s' &imgName, shell = True)