Brief Description

This PR brings exciting new features to PiGear! We've added official support for the powerful Picamera2 API, unlocking a world of possibilities for Raspberry Pi Camera Modules and limited USB camera functionality.

✨Key PiGear Enhancements include:

Seamless Python wrapper: A robust wrapper around Picamera2 API library simplifies integration with minimal code changes for existing PiGear users.
Enhanced camera control: Leverages libcamera API under the hood for Raspberry Pi Camera Modules.
Existing compatibility: Maintains compatibility with PiGear's existing super-charged multi-threaded and colorspace manipulation framework.
Proper Resource management: Ensures proper resource release during PiGear termination.
USB camera support (limited): Provides basic functionality for USB webcams. PiGear could accurately differentiates between USB and Raspberry Pi cameras using metadata.
Backward compatibility: Seamlessly switches to the legacy Picamera library backend if Picamera2 is unavailable.
Standalone functionalities: Standalone functionalities for both legacy picamera and newer picamera2 backends for clarity.
Document Overhaul: *
Advanced optional parameters handling: Handles camera configurational parameters and user-defined settings for various camera types.
- New optional configurationalparameters: Currently Supports "sensor", "format", "controls", "transform", "stride", "buffer_count", and "queue" with sanity checks. Seperated Raspberry Pi camera module exclusive and Unified USB cameras supported optional parameters.
- New user-defined optional parameters: Such as auto_align_output_config, enable_verbose_logs, and more.
Additional changes:
- Logging optimization with warning for common libcamera messages
- Lowered framerate minimum value to 0.0.
- Moved sensor optional parameter to commonly supported picamera2 configurational parameters.
- Removed unsupported bit_depth optional parameters
- Updated PiGear API tagline and introduction
- Fixed colorspace typo bug
- Fixed UnboundLocalError bug for 'picamera2' variable assigment.
- Fixed UnboundLocalError bug for 'queue' variable assignment.

📝 Documentation updates:

Added a warning advising users to disable common libcamera messages when logging is disabled.
Updated Zenodo badge and BibTeX entry
Added complete Picamera2 library installation instructions for pip and from source as a dependency.
Updated Picamera2 installation instructions (including apt, pip, pre-installation on Raspberry Pi images, and compatibility warnings)
Moved legacy Picamera library installation instructions to an admonition.
Removed Importing section from overview to avoid confusion in PiGear.
Overhauled mkdocs theme.
- Added unrecognized_links: ignore to mkdocs.yml for validations.
- Added new features to mkdocs.yml
- Added custom admonition icons to mkdocs.yml
- Migrated to new Google Analytics 4 in mkdocs.yml
- Added new git-authors plugin in mkdocs.yml
- Added new tables markdown extension
- Added custom fences to pymdownx.superfences markdown extension
- Added line_spans: __span and pygments_lang_class: true parameters to pymdownx.highlight markdown extension
- Added normalize_issue_symbols: true to pymdownx.magiclink markdown extension
- Added new mkdocs feature dependency mkdocs-git-authors-plugin
- Replaced depreciated materialxwith supported emoji extension.
- Replaced permalink icon with default one
Added missing version contributors to changelog.md
Added new icons to make headings more readable
Replaced unsupported admonitions with supported ones
Removed all custom admonition icons and color CSS from custom.css
Removed Twitter section from help and docs site metadata
Fixed Ko-fi sponsorship heart hover effect in footer
- Replaced twemoji heart emoji with heart-pulse fontawesome SVG
Fixed titles and indentations in various admonitions.
Removed Gitter community chat sidecard JS file.
Redefined spacing between sections
Fixed various typos, code comments, and hyperlinks URLs.

🧑‍💻 Maintenance Updates:

Moved logging enablement before version logging for consistency in vidgear APIs.
Removed redundant boolean assignment for various APIs internal logging.
Simplified conditional statements and assignments using short-circuiting, Boolean operations, and ternary operators.
Refactored return data handling in netgear_async.py
Refactored vidgear code to improve readability, maintainability, and performance
Added .cache directory to .gitignore
Updated vidgear library version to v0.3.3
Dropped legacy picamera dependency in Setup.py
Improved code efficiency with short-circuiting and formatting
Updated logging practices to be more developer-friendly
Added patch for substring index bug in get_supported_demuxers helper method.
Updated code comments

👷CI Updates:

Temporarily removed PiGear API from code coverage due to hardware limitations

Requirements / Checklist

[x] I have read the PR Guidelines.
[x] I have read the Documentation.
[x] I have updated the documentation accordingly(if required).

Related Issue

342

Context

This update significantly enhances PiGear's camera capabilities with newer libcamera based Picamer2 API while maintaining backward compatibility and improving code structure.

Types of changes

[ ] Bug fix (non-breaking change which fixes an issue)
[x] New feature (non-breaking change which adds functionality)
[ ] Breaking change (fix or feature that would cause existing functionality to change)

abhiTronix / vidgear

🎉 feat(PiGear): Added official support for new Picamera2 API (Fixes #342) #392