Hi Folks,
Im on a quick turnaround putting together a little timelapse kit for my next grow, so I thought I would blog this as yall might find it useful.
Im doing it in a way which others could reproduce quite easily I hope, and get to a decent good quality and low cost.
I did a mini time-lapse for my last grow, but only a small vid early on before the grow lighting was turned on and saturated the poor little IP camera that was tasked with it.
Check it out here ;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElwBn52pXSQ
Doing that I had lots of other ideas how I would like it done properly, showing much more of the growth, start to finish if possible! So here I am, and for this grow im going to give it a crack.
Im going to use an airpot and have a Think Different in there. the camera will have to pan out as it gets older.
At the moment im awaiting a couple of gizmo's to arrive so I can hobble the solution together from relatively standard components. Im going to be using the now famous Raspberry Pi board to run things, and its optional camera module to collect some snapshots at regular intervals and store them away. I might also attach one or more Hd webcams and thus collect several angles at once.
The 5MP camera module of the Raspberry Pi looks quite decent spec for what I need (cant block up my DSLR for months!) , will snapshot a resolution of 2592 x 1944 , very nice compared to the 800x600 I was getting previously on a Tenvis PTZ IP camera. Since the cam will be close at start and physically be stepped back to keep the growing plant in shot, this should give incredible clarity and a HD 1080p video at the end.
So the R-Pi board is en route, also the camera module. As well as this a couple of sold state relays, the R-Pi will drive these and control the grow lighting and white lighting , switching back to white for each time-lapse shot.
That's the plan anyway, I'll post some pics when stuff arrives and as I go along with this project.