Raspberry Pi Classroom Table Timelapse Documentation

After trying to document spring plant and tree growth with a Raspberry Pi timelapse setup I found the variation in lighting over long periods of time produced a lot of bad footage. But I figured using this in the classroom to do timelapse recordings of students working at the table could be useful and not face the same problem of changing lighting conditions. So I created a mashup of my old Replicator 2 3D printing monitor with the timelapse program that conveniently attaches to our hanging outlets and managed to bang out a pretty quick set up for this. I start the program by logging in to a headless Raspberry Pi Zero wifi and the pi waits for a button press to start snapping pictures at 5 second intervals for 15 minutes.

After two recordings taken while I put together another mallet (!) (copying over the first set of images and stitching them together into a video with ffmpeg before starting the second recording the next day after glue-up had dried), I got this:

I think this is a little fast and misses a lot of detail so I think I'll set a shorter interval and maybe fewer frames per second with ffmpeg, which for this I set to 10fps.

Here is what documentation I have:

Design and circuit on an envelope!

3D model mashup

The 3D model takes parts from this Raspberry Pi case (get link) and this Raspberry Pi Camera holder (get link). I used these awesome threaded inserts for the cord clamp.

The whole setup:

Finally, here is the Python program running it, which is also a mashup of the timelapse program and the webcam program.