New York City’s SCA recently started building a new high school near me so I decided to attempt a long term (construction) timelapse. It wasn’t practical for me to dedicate a DSLR for this so I chose to use a Raspberry Pi with an attached camera module. After some experimentation I came up with the following configuration.
- Raspberry Pi 3b running bullseye
- Raspberry Pi v2 camera module with custom lens
- motion capture software
- fswebcam software
- ffmpeg software
- Various scripts and crontab
The motion software runs continuously on the Raspberry Pi and allows me to view the cam via web browser to check operation. It also captures an image every (60) seconds and creates a a (24) hour timelapse every day. These timelapses were not used for this experiment. The fswebcam software was set to capture an image every (3) seconds during work hours using cron. Once a day the captured images were converted to a video clip using ffmpeg. Then (30) of the resulting clips were then assembled into a (30) second video. The Pi and its camera the v2 module are not capable of capturing high quality images or video. However, I think the results were pretty good. Raspberry has a new HQ camera module which I may look into. I hope you enjoy my experiment.
