In part 1 we covered the hardware setup of my Raspberry Pi based timelapse camera. Now we tackle the software.

Features

• Configurable image capture interval.
• Images are stored on a USB flash drive for easy retrieval.
• Only takes pictures during the day. Daytime is determined by the awesome sunwait utility that calculates sunrise and sunset based on latitude and longitude.
• The image capture script can be bypassed by flipping a switch connected to GPIO so you can boot into the OS.
• A log is written to keep track of battery voltage over time.
• The script is updated from the USB flash drive on every boot so you don’t need to manually boot into the OS every time you want to tweak the interval. Simply update the script on the flash drive and on second boot, you’ll be running the new code.

The couple scripts are written in bash and are available in my github here: https://github.com/dewoodruff/picam

Continue reading picam – Raspberry Pi battery powered timelapse camera – part 2 – software →

Timelapse cameras are fun. I’ve done a few timelapse videos (like this one with a really crappy webcam driven by an original Eee PC laptop) and I have some ideas for other long term videos in the future, so I wanted a higher quality, more autonomous setup. My requirements:

• Waterproof so I can strap it to a tree for a few weeks
• Long battery life, so I can strap it to a tree for a few weeks
• Infinitely configurable delay between images depending on my goal for the video
• Easy to retrieve the images from it
• Don’t take pictures over night, because I’m lazy and don’t want to manually weed out black pictures. Sleeping over night means more battery life and less storage used too.

A Raspberry Pi seemed like a perfect platform. They are low power, they have camera module support, they’re small, and they’re cheap. With some extra hardware and scripting I can also turn it off between pictures to save even more power.

Here’s how I built it. Part 1 is the hardware setup and part 2 is the software.

Continue reading picam – Raspberry Pi battery powered timelapse camera – part 1 – hardware →