Saturday, August 22, 2015

Raspberry Pi based Time-lapse camera (with USB battery pack)

So I had an older Raspberry Pi Model B laying in the drawer and my camera module just arrived recently from China.



Actually I ordered  the RPi in a package with a 8 Gb fake Kingstone SD card (which is slow as hell, I could write the noobs img @ around 3 MB/s,  so I think I'll use it to store some data on it) and 1A adapter (Sharp branded) with a cable.
Fortunately I have a 4 Gb class 4 Samsung SD card which I was able to write over 6 MB/s, seems to be decent quality to run my noobs img from it.
But because of the small size of my SD card I'll need some storage to store my pictures or videos, also it would be useful if I would be able to move my raw material to other devices, so I'll use an old also 4 Gb pen drive as my storage, which I also got for free from a friend (they won plenty of these in some promotion)
I'd also like to have a "mobile" camera, so I'll need a power source, which will be a 10600 mAh (@5 volts) battery pack, also since I won't have an Ethernet plug in my pocket, I'll use a cheap but well working edimax wifi adapter.
And of course I'll need some house for the Pi (which all ready have) and some holder for the camera module itself, which I'll probably 3d print or something like that.
All the materials I used (with costs)
- Raspberry Pi Model B with charging cable $35
- Camera module with ribbon cable $15
- Battery pack $20
- Edimax wifi $5
- Raspberry Pi house $5
- 4 Gb SD card free
- 4 Gb USB pen drive free
- Camera module holder free
So the total cost of materials was $80 depending on what you have laying around and how you "plan" to use your "camera system".
My plan is pretty simple:
For OS, I'll use the noobs, since that's the most supported (or at least seems to be for me :-) ), also the OS most well known OS for the RPi for me. But since I'm not planning to connect any screen to my RPi, I'll use the "console mode" of the noobs (also since I only use a simple Model B the GUI is a bit slow for me) to create my material with simple console command via SSH from my Android phone.
To check the results right after I made a picture/video I'll use samba to share the pen drive on the wifi.
Yeah the wifi will come from my phone (Android/share Internet via wifi), so I'll pre-set my RPi to automatically connect to it when it's in range, after it's connected I hope I can check the pen drive stacked to the RPi with my fresh pictures.
My final goal is to create a mobile time-lapse video recording device with 4 hours + recording time.
Will see :-)