Connecting a camera through OpenCV is fairly straightforward. The issue is often in installing OpenCV. OpenCV installs easily on a desktop computer, but on more constrained devices, it may require extra work. In a Raspberry Pi 3, for example, you may need to enable swap space. This allows the system to use the SD card as a temporary memory store. Depending on the device, there are various instructions available online on how to get OpenCV onto a challenging device.
In this recipe, we will connect OpenCV to a camera application on the Raspberry Pi Zero, but if you do not have the hardware, you can run the code on a PC. In future recipes, we will assume knowledge of this and breeze by the explanation of what is going on.