My recent DIY electronics project has been putting together a Raspberry Pi-based camera. The Pi foundation sells a camera board which plugs into the Pi; it’s sold as ‘a bit better than the average camera in a mobile phone.’ But the Pi’s default Raspbian Linux installation comes with a couple programs for controlling the camera, and lets you take still pictures and videos easily.
In the interest of using the camera for something you can’t usually do with a store-bought digital camera, I wrote a short python script which takes a photo assigns it a file name based on the date and time taken. It then does some sampling of the picture, and only keeps pictures which aren’t ‘too dark.’ And then cron runs the photo script once every five minutes. In other words, the Pi is set up for long-form time-lapse photography. The resulting pictures are then easy to compile into a movie.
Inventing Situations. 