I wanted to setup a tiny timelapse-rig using raspberry pi and the official addon-camera.
A quick search returned MotionPie ( https://github.com/ccrisan/motionPie ), and after setting it up using the supplied wiki-pages and some initial configuration I had a feed to watch.
I plugged in a USB-drive (make sure it has a partition and a filesystem MotinoPie can read (ext4 f.ex.)) and under the admin-menu, and “File Storage” you should be able to select the external storage.
In order to create a timelapse you have to save snapshots at regular intervals, this is done under “Still Images”, select “Interval Snapshots” under “Capture Mode” and insert a interval.
Remember 30 pictures per second for a movie equalls 1800 pictures per minute of video.
Dont exagerate your interval, or you will have a very long (and boring?) timelapse.
15s interval over 3 days is 10 minutes of video and 18 000 pictures.
Now the tricky part was that I wanted to create the timelapse outside of MotionPie, and therefore I needed the pictures in sequence, and not using the default file naming.
There was no real legend with variables that I wanted (I wanted to use unix time) – so some quick googling led me to this handy site ( http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-unix-formatting-dates-for-display/ ) – and that site had this handy table:
| %FORMAT String | Description |
|---|---|
| %% | a literal % |
| %a | locale’s abbreviated weekday name (e.g., Sun) |
| %A | locale’s full weekday name (e.g., Sunday) |
| %b | locale’s abbreviated month name (e.g., Jan) |
| %B | locale’s full month name (e.g., January) |
| %c | locale’s date and time (e.g., Thu Mar 3 23:05:25 2005) |
| %C | century; like %Y, except omit last two digits (e.g., 21) |
| %d | day of month (e.g, 01) |
| %D | date; same as %m/%d/%y |
| %e | day of month, space padded; same as %_d |
| %F | full date; same as %Y-%m-%d |
| %g | last two digits of year of ISO week number (see %G) |
| %G | year of ISO week number (see %V); normally useful only with %V |
| %h | same as %b |
| %H | hour (00..23) |
| %I | hour (01..12) |
| %j | day of year (001..366) |
| %k | hour ( 0..23) |
| %l | hour ( 1..12) |
| %m | month (01..12) |
| %M | minute (00..59) |
| %n | a newline |
| %N | nanoseconds (000000000..999999999) |
| %p | locale’s equivalent of either AM or PM; blank if not known |
| %P | like %p, but lower case |
| %r | locale’s 12-hour clock time (e.g., 11:11:04 PM) |
| %R | 24-hour hour and minute; same as %H:%M |
| %s | seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC |
| %S | second (00..60) |
| %t | a tab |
| %T | time; same as %H:%M:%S |
| %u | day of week (1..7); 1 is Monday |
| %U | week number of year, with Sunday as first day of week (00..53) |
| %V | ISO week number, with Monday as first day of week (01..53) |
| %w | day of week (0..6); 0 is Sunday |
| %W | week number of year, with Monday as first day of week (00..53) |
| %x | locale’s date representation (e.g., 12/31/99) |
| %X | locale’s time representation (e.g., 23:13:48) |
| %y | last two digits of year (00..99) |
| %Y | year |
| %z | +hhmm numeric timezone (e.g., -0400) |
| %:z | +hh:mm numeric timezone (e.g., -04:00) |
| %::z | +hh:mm:ss numeric time zone (e.g., -04:00:00) |
| %:::z | numeric time zone with : to necessary precision (e.g., -04, +05:30) |
| %Z | alphabetic time zone abbreviation (e.g., EDT) |
So then it was just a matter of replacing anything under “Image File Name” with “pics/%s” – and everything will be jolly good.
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