RaspberryPi/Timelapse2

Outline

For this project, I was replicating the Raspberry Pi timelapse setup from the RaspberryPi/Timelapse page.

Hardware

• Raspberry Pi
• Pi camera
• Camera case
• Network cable
• Power cable

Setting up the Pi

To begin with, I installed a fresh Kali Linux arm image. I wanted to make sure I had installed the operating system correctly and that I could reach the Pi just fine. I connected the Pi directly to my laptop using a crossover cable. After connecting the two, I restarted both machines. They automatically picked link-local addresses at 169.254.X.Y, which I was able to use to SSH directly into the Pi.

This confirmed that I had everything working ok on the Pi.

Connecting to the Pi

The next step was to connect to the Pi over a network, so that the Pi would be able to download and install any necessary libraries. I started by modifying cmdline.txt on the SD card to manually set the Pi's IP address to 192.168.0.111. I then plugged the Pi into the network router, and was able to SSH into the machine at 192.168.0.111.

Installing Libraries

Once on the Pi, I needed to install some libraries. From my previous adventure at RaspberryPi/Timelapse I knew I needed a few libraries:

• python-picamera
• python-picamera-docs

These packages were not, however, in the aptitude repositories for this OS:

# sudo apt-get install -y python-picamera python-picamera-docs
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
E: Unable to locate package python-picamera
E: Unable to locate package python-picamera-docs

But that's ok, because we can use pip instead!

First, install screen so we can install all this stuff in the background, without having to keep a terminal window open:

sudo apt-get install -y screen

Then install tools onto the Pi:

sudo apt-get install -y vim aptitude python build-essential

Now we shouold have pip and be able to install the Pi camera API:

pip install python-picamera

Scripting

To script taking a picture, use the following code, which loops forever, taking photos and marking them with timestamps:

# pic.py

import picamera
from datetime import datetime
import time

camera = picamera.PiCamera()

while True:

    prefix = datetime.strftime(datetime.now(),"photo_%Y%m%d-%H%M%S")
    filename = prefix+".jpg"

    camera.capture(filename)
    print "Saving photo to %s"%(filename)

    time.sleep(2)