«
»

Timelapse with the RaspberryPi

Published February 7, 2013 | By phillips321

So my Raspberry Pi has been sitting in the box for about a month now while it could have been doing something more useful.

So as I had an evening free I decided to quickly throw something together in order to use a spare webcam to take a photo every 30 or so seconds.

fswebcam

I had plans to put the webcam and the pi inside an old external light fitting i had but unfortunately with the SD card and USB connections poking out it didnt fit!
I guess if I wanted to take this further I could do with a microSD adaper and flipping the USB ports around (or hooking directly into the usb).

From a standard raspbian build all that’s needed is fswebcam.

1
apt-get install fswebcam

.

And now to write the timelapse.sh script:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
#!/bin/bash
touch /root/IMG-0.jpg
while true
do
    sleep 15
    name=IMG
    if [[ -e /root/${name}-0.jpg ]] ; then
        i=1
            while [[ -e /root/${name}-${i}.jpg ]] ; do
                let i++
            done
            name=${name}-${i}
    fi
    fswebcam -b --log file:/root/timelapse.log -r 1280x720 -S 15 -d /dev/video0 --no-banner /root/${name}.jpg
    sleep 15
done
exit 0

And to ensure that it runs at boot time a simple init scrip:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
#!/bin/sh
# /etc/init.d/timelapseinit.sh
# v0.1 phillips321.co.uk
### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides:          timelapseinit.sh
# Required-Start:
# Required-Stop:
# Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop:      0 1 6
# Short-Description: fswebcam from /dev/video0 to /root/IMG-n.jpg
# Description:       Takes photo from webcam at /dev/video0 every 30 seconds and put the jpg at /root/IMG-n.jpg
### END INIT INFO

f_message(){
        echo "[+] $1"
}

# Carry out specific functions when asked to by the system
case "$1" in
        start)
                f_message "Starting timelapse.sh..."
        /root/timelapse.sh &
                f_message "timelapse.sh Started"
                ;;
        stop)
                f_message "Stopping timelapse.sh..."
                killall fswebcam
        killall timelapse.sh
                f_message "timelapse.sh stopped"
                ;;
        *)
                f_message "Usage: $0 {start|stop|status|restart}"
                exit 1
                ;;
esac
exit 0

And don’t forget to ensure it actually executes:

1
2
3
chmod +x /etc/timelapseinit.sh
chmod +x /root/timelapse.sh
update-rc.d timelapseinit.sh defaults

webcambox

I’ve got plans to power this from solar power and set it up in the green house to watch some plants grow overtime. (I know that not locking the exposure/whitebalance/focus and so on will give me crap results…. but remember, my RaspberryPi was sat in a box along with all this kit).

I’ll post the results in a week or so 🙂

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , ,

Leave a Reply

Please feel free to share my content but always link back here :-)