golden-hour

A python script to generate a timelapse video. Designed specifically to record at sunset, and post to twitter with a weather report.

Setup

This project assumes that you will run this on a Raspberry Pi with a CSI-port camera, although pull requests to broaden that support are certainly accepted. @goldenhourSEA runs on a Pi 3 Model B with the Camera Module V2.

Installation

Installing `FFmpeg`

FFmpeg is used to convert the sequence of photos captured by the camera into a video suitable for uploading to Twitter. FFmpeg must be compiled with x264 support. On Raspberry Pi I found these instructions to be helpful. If you are running this on a Mac, brew install ffpmeg should be sufficient.

Installing `golden-hour`

Check out this repo to a convenient location on your Pi.
Run pip install -r requirements (I recommend doing this in a virtualenv)

Configuration

Twitter

Create a Twitter account.
- I recommend a name like "goldenhourXYZ", where XYZ is airport code or abbrevation for your city.
- You may want to associate the account with a phone number, to avoid Twitter's anti-spam measures.
Create a Twitter "app" for that account.
- Make sure to set the access permissions to "Read and write", otherwise you won't be able to post tweets.
- In the root of the repo, create a twitter_secrets.yaml file, and put the consumer key, consumer secret, access token, and access token secret in there:

consumer_key: CONSUMER KEY
consumer_secret: CONSUMER SECRET
access_token_key: ACCESS TOKEN KEY
access_token_secret: ACCESS TOKEN SECRET

Dark Sky (optional)

If you want the weather report, get a Dark Sky API key.

Running automatically

Once you have everything set up, set up a cron job to run golden-hour at the same time every day. Make sure it runs at least one hour before the earliest sunset of the year.

Gotchas:

cron runs in a different environment from your normal shell. In my case, it did not have access to ffmpeg, because I had installed it to /usr/local/bin, but the $PATH only had /bin and /usr/bin.
Your Pi may not be configured to your local timezone. Run date to see what time it is for your Pi, and set the cron job to run at an appropriate translated time. I set mine to run at 2300, which is 3pm local time.

austriker27/golden-hour