Seeking expert review and guidance: rpicam-gui (Qt GUI for rpicam-apps)

[Kletternaut]

Hi @naushir,

You may remember me from my acoustic_focus_stage contribution (PR #810)
and recent bug reports (#885, #821, #822, #795).

I need to be direct about my situation because time is critical.

What I've built:
Over the past 10 months (April - December 2025), I've developed rpicam-gui -
a comprehensive Qt GUI for rpicam-apps:

• ~14,000 lines of C++/Qt code
• Complete coverage of all rpicam-apps tools (vid/still/jpeg/raw/hello)
• 13 organized tabs (General, Output, Video, Still, Image, Focus, Zoom,
  Audio, GStreamer, GST Viewer, Inference, Actions, Expert, Debug)
• GStreamer integration (RTSP/UDP streaming)
• Multi-stream viewer for network monitoring
• AI object detection (Hailo/YOLO integration)
• GPL-3.0 licensed

Quick Demo:

rpicam-gui-2025-12-07_20.26.22.mp4

(Short demonstration of the interface - full feature documentation is in the repository)

My situation:
I'm currently unemployed and losing access to GitHub Copilot (Claude Sonnet)
on December 10th, which has been essential for this development.

I'm facing a dilemma: I want to release this to the Raspberry Pi community,
but I cannot responsibly maintain a public project without the development
tools that made this possible.

What I'm asking:

1. Code Review: Would you be willing to review the private repository
   and provide technical feedback?

2. Guidance: Should I release this "as-is" with limited maintenance,
   or is it better to keep it private until I can properly support it?

3. Raspberry Pi Foundation: Is there any possibility of support or
   connections you could suggest for continuing this work?

4. Co-Maintainers: Do you know anyone in the community who might be
   interested in helping maintain this?

Repository Access:
I've sent you a collaborator invitation to the private repository:
https://github.com/Kletternaut/rpicam-gui

The current stable version is in the beta-0.2.5. 0 branch (default branch).

I'd rather keep the project private than release something I can't properly
support, but I also don't want 10 months of work to go to waste if it could
benefit the community.

Any guidance or suggestions you can provide would be incredibly valuable.

Thank you for your time and for your excellent work on rpicam-apps.

Best regards,
Kletternaut

[naushir]

@Kletternaut thank you for posting this, and my first impressions is that this looks to be a really useful tool that will certainly gather interested from our camera community!

I will be happy to play around with it and do some code reviews, but given the proximity to the holidays, it will likely only be at the beginning of the year now. Raspberry Pi unfortunately won't be able to take over maintenance of the tool itself, but given the usefulness, I think there will be members of the community that will step up to help you. To that end, may I suggest you post the above details to our Raspberry Pi Camera Forums to get folks interested in contributing and helping maintain this application.

There is a user on our forums who also maintains a similar GUI called RPiCamGUI who I suspect might be quite interested in this.

[Kletternaut]

@naushir,

Thank you so much for your encouraging response and willingness to review the project!

I really appreciate your suggestion about the Raspberry Pi Camera Forums - I'll definitely post there to reach the community.

Regarding the timeline: I understand the holidays are coming up, so early next year works perfectly for a detailed code review.

In the meantime, I'm planning to:

1. Make the repository public
2. Post in the Camera Forums as you suggested
3. Set up community support options (GitHub Sponsors/Ko-fi)

The goal is to keep this project sustainable through community support, so active development can continue.

Thank you again for taking the time to respond and for the pointer to the forums. Your work on rpicam-apps has been invaluable, and I hope rpicam-gui can be a useful contribution to the ecosystem.

Best regards,
Kletternaut