cheers ledbud. yeah I guesse it is a bit techy, but hopefully some will come along and it might be real useful to them. raspberry pi at least was a board designed to help get kids into programming but has found a real home with the hacker/maker/diy/amateur electronics. there is lots of info out there on how to do this and that and the other, and google usually yields an answer you can follow step-by-step.
still, one for the techies and tinkerers for sure.
tell you what tho, id love to see your kind of plants under the timelapse dude - you got something seriously awesome going on!! Id swap some of my tech skills for your grow skills anyday
once this camera is done im going to set it up on a grow, so be good for your input then!
Anyway back to the project for now - I addressed storage today. The shots coming off the Pi's camera are high res (2592x1944) and consume something like 2.5MB each. The shots from the webcams are around 300Kb (1280x720)
I am going to end up taking up thousands of shots with the timelapse if I have it my way...
Im planning to record several "tracks" in parallel, so actually there will be several timelapse clips being gathered, later I can see which works best;
day under white light , night under low power LED flash (lpf)
day under grow light and night under lpf
days only under white light
days only under grow light
all for CAM0 (the Pi) , CAM1 and CAM2 (webcams)
Im imagining that CAM0 footage will form the main part of the timelapse vid when its done, it should be single unbroken sequence start to finish. CAM1 and CAM2 will be repositioned as necc and capture some close up angles. Parts of those could be overlayed later on the footage from CAM0 , so you see the big picture and synchronised, some close ups.
So, I decided to put a spare USB backup drive to use. Cleared up and reformatted to exFAT in windows, 300Gb of storage.
ExFAT is a windows filesystem, and by default the Pi wont be able to read it. So the first thing to do was sort that;
sudo apt-get update (update the APT installer to start with)
sudo apt-get install exfat-fuse (install exfat filesystem support for Linux)
Now when hard drive is plugged in, it should auto mount. Mines appeared at /media/HITACHI.
Then installed SAMBA (allows windows filesharing) and configured it to work.
This was covered fairly well in the tutorial here, so not much point repeating it ;
http://www.dingleberrypi.com/2013/05/turn-a-raspberry-pi-into-a-nas-network-attached-storage-server/http://simonthepiman.com/how_to_setup_windows_file_server.phphttp://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/adding-a-user-to-a-samba-smb-share/went with the first guide with user account control for better security btw. other links are useful ref.
Having done that, things are looking good. From a local PC on the LAN , or on my Android tablet over WiFi, I can access the hard drive as a networked-attached-storage (NAS) device. This means later when the thing is busy I can look at the content of that hard drive over the network, pull off images, alter a config file, or read off the daily timelapse vid and see the progress over the last day
Most of the basics of what I need to make this thing good, are nearly there. its collecting images, can now store it somewhere useful, I have remote access by the NAS function, SSH terminal and VNC remote desktop. Plenty of good options there.
Now there are two more details I want to look at, if the Pi can do this on-board would be fantastic;
1) overlaying some text on the captured images (eg Day 1, Day 2 ....) while its capturing them
2)encoding a bunch of images into a timelapse vid. right now I don't know if the pi is going to be up to that, and how long it will take to encode a video so I need to run a few tests. Im hoping the addition of a hard drive rather than going mental on the SD card, will aid that process. lets see....