I Built an Animation Studio for My Kid's Birthday with a Raspberry Pi

Okay so this is a follow up to the Linux StopMotion on the Raspberry Pi that I posted on September 7th. (Click here to find the post)

My kid has developed a fascination with stop motion animation so for her birthday, I put together an animation studio with a Raspberry Pi.

Animation Studio for Kids with a Raspberry Pi

Parts List:

I used the SmartPi Case Kit because it has an enclosure for the camera board and an adapter for a tripod. Now the Raspberry Pi is an all-in-one camera and computer.

Raspberry Pi and Camera Board in the SmartPi Case Kit

Once I got Raspberry Pi and camera board setup on Noobs, I installed the UV4L Raspicam System, opened the uv4l-raspicam.conf file and uncommented the nopreview = line under the overlay options. Check out the Linux StopMotion on the Raspberry Pi post for more details on these steps.

I also had to deal with the camera being sideways so I had to change the rotation line from
# rotation = 0
to
rotation = 270

There was a minor problem I had to address. The 1080 resolution on the 10.1" monitor made everything in the screen teeny tiny. I fixed this by opening the boot config file.

All I had to do was uncomment the frame buffer lines and set the width and height to 1600x900.

After that adjustment, I gave StopMotion a test run and everything worked fine.

Linux StopMotion running on the Raspberry Pi

Now my kid can animate to her heart's content but there are other benefits to giving her her own raspberry pi.

Not only is the Pi a great learning tool for teaching Linux but Noobs also has several applications preinstalled for teaching kids coding.

  • Scratch
  • Sonic Pi
  • Mathematica
  • Python
  • Ruby
  • A hackable version of Minecraft

My plan is to sneak in some learning with the fun. Happy Birthday, Kid

animation, raspberry piMarty Martinanimation, Raspberry Pi, popularComment