Quick start#

Hardware requirements#

  • Raspberry Pi 4 or 5. The 2GB RAM version works with the prebuilt image, but 4GB is recommended if you plan to compile cinepi-raw on the Pi.
  • Official HQ or Global Shutter camera
  • HDMI monitor or a phone/tablet for monitoring

More RAM gives you a larger frame buffer. But ideally you don’t want to have to use the framebuffer anyway, as realtime writing to storage is preferred.

There could be some rare high speed slomo cases you would want faster frame capture for short bursts. In most cases, the 4GB models will do fine and are a better development target.

Installation#

Burn the latest Cinemate image to an SD card (8 GB or larger).

Connect the Pi and the camera sensor board, connect power an boot the Pi. Cinemate should autstart on boot.

Ensure the Pi is powered off before attaching the camera ribbon cable. Hot-swapping may damage the hardware.

Preview#

  • Plug in an HDMI monitor or
  • Connect your phone/tablet to the Wi‑Fi network CinePi (password 11111111). Open a browser and go to cinepi.local:5000 to see the interface. A clean video feed without the GUI is available at cinepi.local:8000/stream.

Recording#

  • Attach a high‑speed drive: an SSD (Samsung T7 recommended), an NVMe drive, or the CFE Hat. Make sure storage media is formatted as ext4 and labeled RAW.

  • Connect a button between GPIO5 and GND (or briefly short these pins with a paper clip). When using the phone preview, you can also start/stop recording by tapping the preview.

That's it—your bare‑bones Cinemate build is ready!

Remember to power everything down before disconnecting hardware!