Time-lapse photography

Pi-Lapse 2: Wychwood Barns Farmer’s Market

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Aerial raspberry pi installation. The boxy-head is the pi(s), attached to a tripod held up by a jib arm. A ten-port powered usb hub is duct taped to the tripod, providing lots of data storage and internet to the Pi's.
Aerial raspberry pi installation. The boxy-head is the pi(s), attached to a tripod held up by a jib arm. A ten-port powered usb hub is duct taped to the tripod, providing lots of data storage and internet to the Pi’s.

Almost immediately after my first foray with the Raspberry Pi timelapse I was contacted by Cookie Roscoe, who coordinates a weekly farmer’s market for The Stop.  The Stop is a community food center here in Toronto, providing lots of programming and emergency food access for lower-income people.  My partner, Elizabeth, worked with them for about three years, so I was super happy to try doing a time-lapse of their market.

Here’s the results!  Lots of technical stuff about what went into the video after the break!

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Pi-Lapse Test Footage

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A camera made of legos! I've built two of these; the photo was taken with the _other_ raspberyy pi camera.
A camera made of legos! I’ve built two of these; this photo was taken with the other raspberry pi camera, during a three-week time-lapse shot.

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.

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