24/7 Webcams & Automated Timelapse Video
Posted: Fri 22 May 2020 9:38 pm
I have set up 3 RPi V2 cameras (North, East & South) overlooking the plains (~6700 ft) in the Foothills west of Boulder, Colorado. The weather station, a Davis VP2 uses Cumulus of course. The Raspberry Pi's use Python Code I've written to adjust the exposure regardless of the time of day 24/7. A high dynamic range light sensor attached to the RPi's enables the exposure to be adjusted based on conditions automatically. The still images are overwritten with text of the current weather conditions, time and shutter speed. The still images are stored remotely on a Windows PC where they are uploaded at 10 minute intervals; however the photos are taken at 30 second intervals during the day (and somewhat longer at night) The PC constructs time lapse movies from the photos of each camera hourly and uploads them to the website. Since we are in a somewhat remote location, there are also videos of Bears, Mountain Lions etc., The weather station has a Blitzortung lightning detector so that data is also available. The Code on the RPi, PC and camera hardware have been refined over the years and I'm toying with creating some documentation so others can take advantage of the system if they wish. Of course writing it all up is the hard part. You can see it all at www.boulderwx.com