Time Lapse Imaging using the Raspberry Pi Model B Revision 2.0

HopWorks First Raspberry Pi Model B Project: Time Lapse Seed Starter Bed Imaging - IDEA STAGE

I just received my Raspberry Pi in the mail yesterday and I already have a quick use for it. I am going to mount it over my seed starter germination bed and use the camera to take time lapse images of the seeds as they germinate. This project will be expanded to allow time lapse images to be acquired from other sources, like IP cameras, web images, etc.

The idea here is to acquire and store high resolution images of our seed starter germination bed, store them, process them a bit, and make them available to the home network via FTP, web interface, or database access.

This should be easy enough to do for a functional starter project. But as some things in our lives seem simple at the end-result, often the inner-workings are a bit more complex. So let us get started!

First, I need to be sure the RPi (short for Raspberry Pi) is working. This involves placing the NOOBS software on a 8gb flash card, connecting a mouse, keyboard, and HDMI monitor, and booting up the RPi. Once in, I will have to set the IP address to a static one from a DHCP assigned one. Also, I will need to set up SSH access so I can terminal the device with my other machines and their installed Putty clients. When that is working, I will have to install LAMP (Linux, Apache, MYSQL, and PHP) software and configure it, set up VNC so I can remote access the RPi desktop, Finally, I will have to install support for the RPi camera device.

All that above is just to get going on the project. I will then have to write software, probably in Python, that will take an image from the camera at a set interval and store that image on the flash card. I will also have to write the web interface so those images may be obtained from other users on my network. I haven't decided how the images will be processed yet, but probably using PHP to time-stamp them, and use them to create on-demand movie files for time-lapse viewing. I already know how to include meta-data in the images and how to encode them to say JPG, PNG, or even raw format.

After all this is in place, I can code features that will allow me to acquire images from existing IP cameras on the network using the same image storing process. All of this on one networked RPi.

I have a lot of work to do on this so here I go! =)

More when I code it.

Hop