2021-02-04 - timelapses with RasPi

somewhere around the end of january my son said surprised that one of our flowers is bigger than it was before. we said that yes, flowers do grow over time. and he replied “but i cannot see it”. so i did the only thing a father could do – i've hacked up a quick timelaps setup, using RasPi with some full HD webcam as a hardware platform.

here is a sample of super-fast forward 80h of cardamine growth, packed into a 9s video.

it was trivial to setup and fun to watch effects after a couple of days. my son was astonished to see how his cardamine “plantation” grows in a high-speed motion. :)

the whole thing had also some nice, side-bonuses. not only my sons learned sth new, but the older one (who was “nano-farmer” here) now knows why seeds shall not be packed dense one on the other (see picture on the right). ;) thus next timelaps we did was already done with much less dense seeding (see timelaps mentioned before). when cardamine was ready to be cut, both of them were eating them happily, which is not that common and probably would not have worked out, if we just bought ready product.

it was fun for the whole family. after doing two cardamine timelapses i now think about doing the same trick with melting ice. :)