How to do camera settings?

[davefes]

In your example webcam.py the Setting appear to be imported into webcam.py from help.py. Then after camera_init() you modify some of them.

Do the Setting imported before camera_init() have any effect? I tried to modify help.py, ie 'speffect' but that change does not seem to come through to webcam.py.

Should not the camera settings be done after camera_init(), as below?.

import camera
from machine import Pin
import utime

flash_light = Pin(04,Pin.OUT)

camera.init()

#  camera settings
camera.pixformat(0) #  0:JPEG, 1:Grayscale (2bytes/pixel), 2:RGB565
camera.framesize(10) #  1:96x96, 2:160x120, 3:176x144, 4:240x176, 5:240x240
                    #  6:320x240, 7:400x296, 8:480x320, 9:640x480, 10:800x600
                    #  11:1024x768, 12:1280x720, 13:1280x1024, 14:1600x1200
                    #  15:1920x1080, 16:720x1280, 17:864x1536, 18:2048x1536
camera.quality(30) #  [0,63] lower number means higher quality
camera.contrast(0) #  [-2,2] higher number higher contrast
camera.saturation(0) #  [-2,2] higher number higher saturation. -2 grayscale
camera.brightness(0) #  [-2,2] higher number higher brightness. 2 brightest
camera.speffect(2) #  0:,no effect 1:negative, 2:black and white, 3:reddish,
                   #  4:greenish, 5:blue, 6:retro
camera.whitebalance(0) #  0:default, 1:sunny, 2:cloudy, 3:office, 4:home
camera.aelevels(0) #  [-2,2] AE Level: Automatic exposure
camera.aecvalue(0) #  [0,1200] AEC Value: Automatic exposure control
camera.agcgain(0)  #  [0,30] AGC Gain: Automatic Gain Control

flash_light.on()
utime.sleep(0.1) #  seems to take awhile for the flash to fire-up
img = camera.capture()
flash_light.off()

print (len(img))

#  save image
with open('image.jpeg', 'w') as outfile:
    outfile.write(img)

Sometimes I get a "buffer protocol required" error.

Appreciate your comments and thanks for producing this comprehensive project. Dave