hackgt-timelapse

A fire-and-forget system for timelapses on Raspberry Pis

Configuration

To set the wait time (in seconds) between photo captures, configure the WAIT_TIME env var in crossbuild.sh

export WAIT_TIME=10 # seconds

To configure the AWS S3 upload configure the following environment variables in the (.gitignored) credentials.sh file:

Variable	Description
BUCKET_NAME	S3 bucket name (default: hackgt-timelapse)
REGION	S3 region (default: us-east-1)
ACCESS_KEY	Access key (no default)
SECRET_KEY	Secret key (no default)

Building

hackgt-timelapse is only compatible with Raspberry Pis (any model) with a first-party camera attached.

While this project can be compiled directly on the Raspberry Pi, it will be slowww. Since Rust makes it very easy to cross-compile for other platforms, we'll do that instead.

Install tools

First off, make sure that Rust is installed. Then follow either of these instructions depending on the device that you're targeting:

ARMv7 (e.g. models 2 or 3) as a Rust target (easier):

1. Install standard crates: rustup target add armv7-unknown-linux-gnueabihf
2. Install compiler toolchain: sudo apt install gcc-arm-linux-gnueabihf

Add ARMv6 (e.g. Pi Zero or original Pi v1) as a Rust target (harder):

1. Install standard crates: rustup target add arm-unknown-linux-gnueabihf

2. NB: the toolchain installed by sudo apt install gcc-arm-linux-gnueabihf (despite the name) is not compatible with ARMv6. If you have it installed, you must uninstall it before proceeding.

3. Clone the Raspberry Pi Tools repository

4. Add the toolchain to your path (in your .bashrc)

    # Add linker with support for ARMv6
    export PATH=/path/to/rpi-tools/arm-bcm2708/arm-linux-gnueabihf/bin:$PATH
    export PATH=/path/to/rpi-tools/arm-bcm2708/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libexec/gcc/arm-linux-gnueabihf/4.9.3:$PATH
   

Actually compiling

1. Make sure to set your configuration.
2. Change BUILD_DIR in crossbuild.sh to point to the root of this project's directory. This is used for finding the mmal headers during cross-compilation.
3. Run ./crossbuild.sh --release to build a self-contained binary that you can ship directly on your Raspberry Pi
4. Builds will appear in target/arm-unknown-linux-gnueabihf/release as hackgt-timelapse

Running

Before you start, make sure that you've set up your Pi correctly by running raspi-config:

• Enable the camera
• Configure network access (e.g. Wi-Fi)
• Ensure that wait for network at boot is enabled

Since configuration is baked into the build, ./hackgt-timelapse will start capturing timelapse images and uploading to S3. Each timelapse instance will upload images to a folder named after its wlan0 MAC address to make multi-camera setups a breeze.