raspistill not displaying any image via SSH or Remote Desktop

Submitted by Ferruccio on Wed, 01/11/2017 - 01:39

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Hey everyone;

So after going through two raspberry pi boards, one battborg, one picoborg reverse, and one camera module (using a replacement camera module and on my 2nd raspberri pi replacement) I cannot get raspistill to display any sort of picture on my computer.

I was following the instructions which mentioned using SSH, so that's what I was using (PuTTY) and I have the camera installed and attempted "raspistill -d"

From what I have been googling for the past few hours, I am getting conflicting info over SSH vs. VNC. I heard in one forum that SSH cannot display anything graphical, so I am connected via remote desktop (is this not VNC? I still don't know), and I still cannot get anything to display.

The camera is clearly working since the red light turns on for a set number of seconds. However, no image shows up on PuTTy or anything I could access via remote desktop. The interface just pauses for a few seconds before bringing up the command line again.

Here is my setup:

Microsoft Surface Pro 3 running Windows 10

Diddyborg

With these two tools, what do I need to do in order to get the camera module to do as the instructions say?

I apologize if my internet investigating skills aren't up to par, but I'm at my wit's end. I have no idea what to do from here. What I expected to only take a day to get working has now taken weeks. I started this in November.

piborg's picture

piborg

Wed, 01/11/2017 - 10:27

The camera is probably working fine, this is just a quirk with how raspistill actually works.
Basically it outputs the camera image directly to the monitor, not to the local VNC or Remote Desktop session.

You are correct that a standard SSH session will not display graphical output, but both Remote Desktop and VNC will.
Almost everything works fine with both Remote Desktop and VNC, raspistill is one of those awkward exceptions.

You can take a photo from the camera instead and check if it is okay.

First use raspistill to capture an image like this:
raspistill -o ~/cam.jpg

Now open the file manager using a VNC or Remote Desktop session.
Go to the /home/pi directory.
If everything worked there should be a file called cam.jpg
Double-click on the cam.jpg file, it should open the image in a viewer.

Ferruccio

Wed, 01/18/2017 - 03:44

Thanks for this information. I had a feeling that that was what I needed to do.

However, I am running into problems viewing a desktop environment using a vnc viewer. I installed a vnc server on the raspberry pi and I set up a separate account for VNC and everything, but I am unable to get a gui to show on the vnc viewer.

I just get another command line environment identical to the one that I am viewing via SSH.

I'm not sure what I am doing wrong. I've looked at like 5 or 6 different tutorials for setting up a VNC server and I have tried all those procedures and in each time I can't get any desktop environment to show. The most recent tutorial I am trying to use to set up a vnc server is here:

https://www.realvnc.com/docs/raspberry-pi.html

Well, after a couple of hours of continuing to try, I am just about ready to throw in the towel with this. I don't know what I am missing here, or what I am doing wrong.

I am completely lost and stumped. No matter what I do, every login I have done via Tight VNC results in the following screen, with no desktop environment in sight, despite supposedly installing the necessary packages.

Images: 
piborg's picture

piborg

Wed, 01/18/2017 - 10:34

What I would do is first see if an image was saved from raspistill.
Run this command from a terminal: ls -l ~/cam.jpg

If message returned ends with No such file or directory it did not get an image from the camera.
If the message returned ends with /home/pi/cam.jpg it did save a file and everything is probably fine.

If the image did save fine you should be able to skip the VNC setup and continue with setting up your DiddyBorg.

As for VNC, it is usually fairly simple to setup so I am surprised it is proving so tough to get it working.
Do you know which distribution you are running on your Raspberry Pi (e.g. Raspbian Jessie Lite)?

Ferruccio

Wed, 01/25/2017 - 02:18

Hi Piborg,

I followed your instructions and the camera itself definitely works.

The distro I'm running is Raspbian Gnu/Linux 8 (jessie)

*edit* I tried using a different VNC viewer (RealVNC) and the same problem persists.

It merely connects to a command line interface and no GUI is shown.

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