Originally posted on cri.dev
Time-lapses always fascinated me. So I wanted to create one on my own.
Had a spare Raspberry Pi Zero W catching dust, you can purchase one for ~ 25$ and the related Raspberry Pi Camera module for < 20$.
Sneak peek
Partial time-lapse of 2020-09-08 in 20 FPS (1 snapshot taken every minute)
Requirements
To build your own you'll need
- Raspberry Pi (model Zero W works pretty good)
- Raspberry Pi Camera Module
- 16GB SD Card or bigger
- (optionally Wi-Fi connectivity for easy access)
There is even an official High Quality Camera, that will give even better quality time-lapses!
Table of contents
Preparation
Flash the Pi
You'll need to flash Raspberry Pi OS on a fresh SD Card.
Either with Balena Etcher or the official Raspberry Pi Imager. The procedure is extremely straight forward.
Just go through the steps and you have Rasperry Pi OS installed on a SD card.
Set up Wi-Fi connectivity
To get the Pi connect to your Wi-Fi, you'll need to create a file called wpa_supplicant.conf
in the SD card.
The contents of wpa_supplicant.conf
should look like this (configure it accordingly):
ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
ap_scan=1
update_config=1
network={
scan_ssid=1
ssid="YOUR_WIFI_ACCESS_POINT"
psk="YOUR_WIFI_PASSWORD"
}
Enable SSH access
To enable SSH access (with the user pi
and password raspberry
), simply create an empty file (without extension), called ssh
in the SD card.
Enable Camera module
To enable to camera module, you can configure it through the raspi-config
utility.
But also with the file config.txt
in SD card.
Open it and add the following to it:
start_x=1
gpu_mem=128
Just make sure there are no other occurrencies for start_x
or gpu_mem
Create the time-lapse
Take image with raspistill
raspistill
is the command line tool for capturing still photographs with the camera module.
The idea is to take a snapshot every x minutes using raspistill
To take a single image, I'm using the following bash script called /home/pi/take-snapshot
:
#!/bin/bash
set -e
DATE=$(date -u +"%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ")
SNAPSHOTS_DIR=/home/pi/snapshots
SNAPSHOT_PATH="$SNAPSHOTS_DIR/$DATE.jpg"
CURRENT_PATH="$SNAPSHOTS_DIR/current.jpg"
echo "$DATE"
mkdir -p "$SNAPSHOTS_DIR"
echo "taking snapshot $SNAPSHOT_PATH"
raspistill \
--width 1280 \
--height 960 \
--quality 100 \
--output "$SNAPSHOT_PATH"
echo "snapshot saved $SNAPSHOT_PATH"
echo "adding watermark $SNAPSHOT_PATH"
cd $SNAPSHOTS_DIR
montage \
-label "$DATE" \
$SNAPSHOT_PATH \
-pointsize 30 \
-gravity Center \
-geometry +0+0 \
$SNAPSHOT_PATH
cp $SNAPSHOT_PATH $CURRENT_PATH
This script will take a snapshot, name it in the format %Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ.jpg
and put it in the folder /home/pi/snapshots
.
At the end this photo is also watermarked using montage
from the ImageMagick family.
Schedule capture with crontab
To take a photo every 5 minutes using the above script, you can set up a simple cron job for that.
Just run crontab -e
to edit the cron schedules and add the following lines
SHELL=/bin/bash
*/5 * * * * sh /home/pi/take-snapshot >> /home/pi/snapshots.log 2>&1
Directory listing of snapshots
You can expose a web server on port 80 to easily list all images (and time-lapses) taken in the folder /home/pi/snapshots
.
Start the server at boot by adding the following to your crontab
@reboot sudo python3 -m http.server --directory /home/pi/snapshots 80
Create time-lapse with ffmpeg
Taking a time-lapse for the day 2020-08-31
with ffmpeg is as easy as running
cat 2020-08-31*.jpg | ffmpeg -r 10 -i - -c:v libx264 -vf "format=yuv420p,scale=1280:-2" time-lapse-2020-08-31.mp4
raspberry-pi-time-lapse repository
You can clone / fork the repo christian-fei/raspberry-pi-time-lapse and create your first time-lapse in no time.
There are various scripts that simplify the steps above:
-
take-snapshot
to take a watermarked and timestamped photo in the foldersnapshots/
-
server
to start a HTTP server on port 80 listing all snapshots and time-lapses taken so far -
rsync-snapshots
to sync the snapshots to from the Raspberry Pi to your PC -
create-time-lapse
to create a time-lapse for a specific date -
crontab
to schedule the snapshots and spin up the server
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