Set-up Tutorial

Welcome to the First Edition of the set-up tutorial for the Time-lapse Camera

Basic Overview

The current System consists of 3 systems.

The chain of events is as follows:

The Camera Takes a Timelapse of Photos during the day
The Camera compresses those photos into a small .mp4 video
The Camera then Uploads the .mp4 video to the Server
When the Server gets the uploaded video, it will stick it to the end of the current video
When the Server has completed that, the video will be viewable on the WebPage

Hopefully in the future there will be a Plug n' Play system where when we need another camera we can simply:

However that's not currently the Case

We assume that we have a working Pi that has just logged in for the first time

The Pi will first need the timelapse folder. It will be placed in /home/pi directory

This folder will contain the scripts to actually run the program and some testing scripts

Here is a list of modules that must be installed in order for the program to work

Modules : ffmpeg, pysftp

To install them you must copy and paste the below commands into the terminal. (you can be at any directory when installing)

Links are provided above for official documentation

  =>   'pip install pysftp'

  =>   'pip install ffmpeg-python'

Crontab is a default program that allows us to automatically run a script (python file) at a certain time.

Checkout the websites below (the first one has more detail) on how to create a crontab code line

To edit the crontab file type this into any terminal on the pi

  =>   crontab -e

An editor will then appear (likely vim) and the following line will need to be inputted and saved

  =>   */30 8-16 * * 1-5 python3 /home/pi/timelapse/timelapse.py