Port Elgin Fall to Spring Winter Time Lapse with Raspberry PI & python pi-timolo

The pi-timolo python program code and installation instructions are available on my github repo at https://github.com/pageauc/pi-timolo
Short version of this video at    • Port Elgin Winter Time Lapse music vi...  
Port Elgin Winter 2014-2015 Time Lapse Fall to Spring
Watch for the moon rises. The first one is near 1-Dec top left and there are a few more later in the video above the houses across the street.

Well, when we got back from wintering in Texas, I checked my raspberry pi computer that I left to record the winter. Approx 47,000+ images were taken at 5 minute intervals throughout the winter. Images are just as they were saved from the camera. I edited out some parts of the video so not all images were used.

Winter Timelapse Images are 1080p taken every 5 minutes. YouTube video is 720p. Video was encoded at 20fps.
Image numbering Starts at 10000 and ends at 57047 so approx 47047 images were saved taken at 5 min intervals (I now set interval to 3 minutes) . I broke them into 10,000 image folders that are approx 2.1 GB so total for all images is about 10GB. This could easily fit on a 16 GB SD card but 32 might be better. In my case I leave this camera in the window all year so I attached an old 1 TB external USB drive formatted as ext4. It has been running for over 2 years and is less than 5% used. Every once in a while something interesting happens like replacing the driveway across the street.    • Timelapse Replace Concrete Driveway -...   Video is a bit choppy due to 3 minute interval so driveway video was encoded at 5 fps

Using an external drive puts less RW activity on the SD card and the HD is faster. I have the camera and USB plugged into a small UPS since there is no internet to get current time and camera will run during power failures. This RPI does not have a Real Time Clock module installed. I configure pi-timolo to save timelapse images as continuous in a number sequence. I create a new subfolder for each yearly winter period starting in the fall approx Sept.

I have another setup that is just a RPI in a case that also holds the camera inside the case plus another one in a fake security camera housing. I have installed a power shutdown switch and associated script so I can safely shut it down. It is plugged into a USB battery pack and lasts for over a day since no wifi adapter is needed.

I used an early version of a python program I wrote called pi-timolo This stands for Raspberry PI, Time lapse, Motion detection and Low light, The program is written in python and uses average pixel value and a threshold value to detect start of twilight and ramp camera ISO and exposure settings to automatically transition smoothly between day/night modes automatically without needing a clock time reading. This algorithm works well and is even better on the new version of pi-timolo. A clock or accurate time is not needed for determining sunrise and sunset, except if you need accurate date/time information optionally displayed directly on the images

The current version of pi-timolo is much improved over the version used for this video. After copying the images to my NAS, I encoded the images in batches of 10,000 using mencoder 64 bit on my Win7 desktop computer. mencoder can be found on sourceforge here

http://mplayerwin.sourceforge.net

Each batch of 10,000 images was put in its own subfolder and I created a text file listing of all the image file names in each subfolder sorted by file name. This list is used by mencoder during encoding. From a DOS window in the folder containing the images I typed the following command

dir /b /on *.jpg

You should redirect the above command to an image.txt file using the greater than symbol. YouTube will not allow greater than symbol or brackets in a YouTube video description.

I then created a batch file to run mencoder.exe for each batch of images. I created a w: mapped network drive to my image folder share located on my NAS. This share contains the image subfolders eg Part_1, Part_2 Etc. Here is a typical batch file command that worked for me.

rem w is a NAS mapped drive to my image file subfolders
w:
rem Part_1 is a subfolder containing a portion of the total images
cd Part_1
rem Change the path to the mencoder.exe file as required.
rem Note the images.txt file listing all the jpg files to encode
rem must be located in each image subfolder.
c:\Users\Pageauc\mencoder64\mplayer-svn-37386-x86_64/mencoder.exe -nosound -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:aspect=16/9:vbitrate=8000000 -vf scale=1280:720 -o winter_part1_30.avi -mf type=jpeg:fps=30 mf://@images.txt

You can modify the above to suit your situation and file locations.

Drop me a line if you have any questions.
Claude ....