The last few days I’ve been working on a new home hacking project. The eventual plan is to create a panoramic time-lapse of sunrise as seen from my house each morning. We’ve got a wonderful view, and recording some of those beautiful morning colors as the sun comes up over the Alps should make them easier to appreciate — without setting my alarm for 6 AM!
We have little windows in our attic that look out over the view. And being so high up in the house, they have a commanding view over the trees in front of our house. So I knew I needed my camera mounted up there. That location, in turn, fixed some other variables. There’s power up there, but no ethernet, so the camera needs to be on wifi. (Yes, I’m kicking myself. I’m an idiot for not specifying an ethernet run up to there. But the good news is there’s a closet where I can run it, so doing it myself will be quick and easy.)
I got a camera for my Raspberry Pi. I’ve had bad experiences in the past with webcams due to cheap lenses. So when I saw a camera module with a CS mount lens included, I went for it. The specs of the Raspberry Pi camera are incredible. The fact that it is on a high speed bus direclty attached to the GPU is very interesting. It means that the GPU can accelerate video compression. So the little Raspberry Pi can still manage to stream 1080p video!
In fact, once I had it hooked up and mounted up in the window, I needed to focus it. I found some instructions on how to stream video from it. They worked flawlessly. Using VLC to watch the camera’s output, I got it aimed and focused. I loved having the stream so much, I left it running. Paste this URL into VLC to see the stream: http://pi.nella.org:8554 (IPv6 only; and it’s not up anymore anyway)
Video streaming only works over IPv6, because I don’t want to fuss around with IPv4 NAT traversal settings. NATs are stupid; IPv6 is the answer. And IPv6 is getting easier and easier…
As for the time-lapses, I used Go to write a little program to that uses a library to calculate the time of sunrise and sunset (thank you Github user keep94!). My program wakes up a bit early and starts snapping images. Afterwards, it runs a script to make the time-lapse. It uses the technique shown in this post on the Ubuntu forums.
Each day’s results are currently posted here. (IPv6 only)
Looking forward to some better weather and some beautiful sunrises and sunsets!
Leave a Reply