phototimer - create timelapses with your Raspberry Pi

phototimer gives you a smart way to capture photos for your timelapses. It is smart because it only takes pictures between the hours you specify and creates a useful folder structure. It is simple because it only depends on Python and raspistill both of which are normally already available.

Blog posts on phototimer:

Example videos:

YouTube playlist created with PhotoTimer

How does it work?

Start phototimer through a terminal, ssh connection or @reboot crontab specifying the amount of seconds between photos after that. By default photos are stored in /mnt/usbflash, but this is configurable along with daylight hours and the quality level of the photos.

This is an example config.py file which should create files that are about 2MB in size:

config = {}
config["am"] = 400
config["pm"] = 2000

config["flip_horizontal"] = True
config["flip_vertical"] = False
config["metering_mode"] = "matrix"

config["base_path"] = "/var/image"
config["height"] = 1536
config["width"] = 2048
config["quality"] = 35

Usage

$ python take.py 60 &

This will takes a photo every 60 seconds. The default base folder is /mnt/usbflash, photos are then put in a folder such as: Output file format

/2014/11/20/762132131.jpg
/yyyy/mm/hh/milliseconds

Default hours to take images is between 7am and 5pm + 1 hour either side
Designed to be run constantly - with the quality settings this equates to about 1gb of JPG images per day

Docker

Stay tuned for a Dockerfile that packages this code into a single unit. For now checkout alexellis2/raspistill for a Docker image with the raspistill tool installed.

You will need to run the container in privileged mode to gain access to the camera.

If you have a HDD or USB pen-drive mounted at /mnt/data, then start the contaniner like this:

# docker run --privileged -v /mnt/data/:/var/image --name cam -d alexellis2/phototimer

If you need specific overrides in your config then mount it into the running container:

#docker run --restart=always --privileged -v `pwd`/phototimer/config.py:/root/images/config.py -v /mnt/data/:/var/image --name cam -d alexellis2/phototimer

Troubleshooting

If you find that phototimer is automatically exiting then you may want to use a tool like screen to make sure you can keep an eye on the process.

$ screen
$ cd phototimer
$ python2 take.py 60
[Control A + D]

To reconnect later type in screen -r.

Unit testing

The exposure calculations and some other functions have been unit tested, if you change the code or want to extend it please look at these before contributing.

Here's how you run them:

chmod 700 ./run_tests.sh
./run_tests.sh

Feedback?

Please get in touch with me on Twitter @alexellisuk if you have any requests, comments or suggestions. If you run into problems then you could also raise a Github issue.

digitalbear/phototimer