Raspberry Pi Timelapse.

Here is my attempt at shooting a time lapse video on the raspberry pi 2.

This serene sequence is a fantastic fusion of art and technology shot and processed on hardware that costs < 60$. Let me first show you the camera I used to create this time lapse.

The Raspberry Pi2 comes with a dedicated CSI (Camera Serial Interface) that takes a ribbon cable. Thankfully the camera I used had native support on the RPi2 so I didn’t have to install any other drivers. It was literally plug and play. Luckily I had a case with an opening that allowed for the ribbon cable to pass through it.

The Raspberry Pi2 was connected to a 10,000 maH power bank. I originally expected it to last about 24 hours but later learned things the hard way. The Rpi2 pulls about 400mA of power meaning it should Ideally have run for 10000/400 = 25 hours on a full charge. How ever I forgot to compute the battery efficiency of 70% which cause it to die about an hour before sunset during a previous attempt, footage of which has been attached below.

Once the camera is plugged in we do

$ sudo raspi-config

and make sure we enable the camera interface and restart the device. then a simple

 $vgencmd get_camera 

# which should return 

supported=1 detected=1 

Else check all connections including the ribbon connected on the camera module below the lens that has to be pressed firmly in place. To test the quality of the camera by taking a full photo. we can use raspistill.

$raspistill -o test.jpg -vf -awb auto -ex auto 

# What this means is 

# 

# -o is to specify the output file for the picture. 

# -vf is to vertically flip the image (since my camera was attached upside-down). 

# -awb sets the auto white balance on. 

# -ex sets automatic exposure. 

Since the camera is interfaced at a GPU level we wont be able to get a preview of the camera using a VNC server which makes framing the time-lapse difficult. To over come this we install vlc media player to create a live stream on the pi

$sudo apt-get install vlc

and then we simply run

$raspivid -o - -t 0 -vf -w 640 -h 480 -fps 30 | cvlc -vvv stream:///dev/stdin --sout '#rtp{sdp=rtsp://:8554}' :demux=h264 

#Which means use raspivid to take a video that is vertically flipped 

#with a resolution of 640 x 480 at 30fps 

# Then pipe the video to vlc media player and create 

# an RTSP stream at rtsp://'raspberrypi ip':8554/ 

# which is encoded using h264 

This stream can be opened using vlc media player on any tablet/computer or device as far as it is on the same network.
There is a very nice python library that I used to create the time lapse.
Here is the github gist of the program I used to create this timelapse.

I store all images in an S3 bucket because it makes viewing the images a lot easier. Because the camera can only be used by one application at a time so its not possible to access the live feed and run a time lapse at the same time. Upload the images to an S3 bucket means I can see the recently taken images with ease by accessing the public url of the content.
Scope for improvement:

• Complete support for sunrise time-lapses
• Add ability to change camera settings at a given time of day
• Add support to share images/video outside of AWS.