A month long time-lapse - how to control?

[Phunk]

Morning All,

I've been tasked with setting up a daytime time-lapse for a month long construction project about 150 miles away from me.

I'm going to use a Canon 60D DSLR, powered from a 110ah 12v leisure battery topped up with a 100w solar panel.

The issue that I'm having is what to control the time-lapse with. I could use magic lantern but that will run contiunously meaning lots of extra pictures to work through and a larger drain on the battery.

Ideally I need some kind of low power controller that will signal the camera to take a photo every minute from 8am till 8pm. Any ideas? I only have a week till it begins!

[opieoilman]

Not cheap, but this might do the trick, and sounds like a pretty cool toy for catching lightning etc once you've finished with that project.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/MIOPS-Controllable-Camer...

I use one of these and it's fine for my needs, but only does up to 99 hours. I thought there was one that did up to 99 days when I was looking, but that could have been a typo.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Jintu-Timer-Remote-Contr...

[ashleyman]

You could always use the official Canon remote as there's no limit on the amount of exposures it can take. You just won't be able to stop the shutter overnight.

A quick google resulted in this: Harbotronics DigiSnap 2700 https://www.harbortronics.com/Products/Digisnap270...

or this:

http://photosentinel.com/photosentinel-controller/

I've heard of Photo Sentinel before, they're stuff is quite expensive but does work well.

[Simpo Two]

Phunk said:

I've been tasked with setting up a daytime time-lapse for a month long construction project about 150 miles away from me.

I'm going to use a Canon 60D DSLR, powered from a 110ah 12v leisure battery topped up with a 100w solar panel.

The issue that I'm having is what to control the time-lapse with. I could use magic lantern but that will run contiunously meaning lots of extra pictures to work through and a larger drain on the battery.

Ideally I need some kind of low power controller that will signal the camera to take a photo every minute from 8am till 8pm. Any ideas? I only have a week till it begins!

I came this way in 1992, setting up four SLRs to fire once an hour for three months. We used car batteries for power (no solar panels then so they had to swapped every week) and got timers made up with a relay that physically pressed the shutter release once an hour. It wasn't 100% reliable but good enough. And an awful lot of slides to transfer to video afterwards - but the proceeds did pay for my first Jaguar

[SystemParanoia]

You could probably use an Arduino or a Microbit or a Raspberry pi to trigger it.

Raspberry pi
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eAYxnSU2aw

The microbit can trigger an android powered camera with bluetooth

the arduino requires some inventive hackery

Edited by SystemParanoia on Wednesday 19th July 22:04

[sgrimshaw]

Can auto power off be disabled completely on a 60D ?

If not, even if you can find a way to only take images between 8:00am and 8:00pm, isn't it going to power down some time after 8:00pm?

[Phunk]

Ok, think I've figured out a way!

I'm going to use a inline 12v 24hr timer that'll simply cut the power between the times I choose.

When the camera wakes, magic lantern should restart and the timelapse resume (hopefully!)

[SystemParanoia]

might wanna test it tonight

[Tuna]

When we did that for our self-build, I ran the canon off a laptop, using thirdparty software (GBTimelapse, by Granite Bay) which could do scheduled shoots and get the images off the camera so the card wouldn't fill up. I think it generated about a terrabyte of data. This was a few years back so there are other options around. It helped that I could then remotely log into the laptop and check it hadn't died.

These days I'd consider getting aerial footage into the mix. For construction projects it gives great context. If you weren't so far away you could even consider aerial timelapse, though that's quite experimental.

Edited by Tuna on Friday 21st July 13:45

[Otispunkmeyer]

SystemParanoia said:

You could probably use an Arduino or a Microbit or a Raspberry pi to trigger it.

Raspberry pi
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eAYxnSU2aw

The microbit can trigger an android powered camera with bluetooth

the arduino requires some inventive hackery

Edited by SystemParanoia on Wednesday 19th July 22:04

Should be possible to have an IR blaster output from the arduino to the camera for remote shutter. You just need to know what to blast across. Not sure how quickly you can rummage that up in a week mind.

Plenty of people turn up on google searches using Arduinos to make IR blasters for TVs, AC units and the like. I can't imagine it being much different. Just have to hope you don't block line of sight!

I will say, my experience of Arduino with the ATMEGA micros are that they aren't exactly power freindly. Then again we were trying to power them on a single 9V battery. They wouldn't last long though.

[Otispunkmeyer]

Tuna said:

When we did that for our self-build, I ran the canon off a laptop, using thirdparty software (GBTimelapse, by Granite Bay) which could do scheduled shoots and get the images off the camera so the card wouldn't fill up. I think it generated about a terrabyte of data. This was a few years back so there are other options around. It helped that I could then remotely log into the laptop and check it hadn't died.

These days I'd consider getting aerial footage into the mix. For construction projects it gives great context. If you weren't so far away you could even consider aerial timelapse, though that's quite experimental.

Edited by Tuna on Friday 21st July 13:45

Time intensive but could you do that with a drone? Maybe turn up morning and night and send the drone to a known lat, lon to take a shot?

[Tuna]

Otispunkmeyer said:

Time intensive but could you do that with a drone? Maybe turn up morning and night and send the drone to a known lat, lon to take a shot?

Depends on your commitment. Mid range consumer drones can pretty reliably return to a known location and take the same shot - which is manageable if you're local to the site.

If you had a strong commitment to do this on a regular basis, there are some commercial solutions that could be configured to do the job fairly autonomously.

You could also come up with some interesting hacky and experimental stuff - the higher end consumer machines can be programmed and you could try video bursts throughout the day to get some sense of movement as well as an overall timelapse. It all rather depends on what the client wants to achieve.

[SystemParanoia]

Otispunkmeyer said:

SystemParanoia said:

You could probably use an Arduino or a Microbit or a Raspberry pi to trigger it.

Raspberry pi
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eAYxnSU2aw

The microbit can trigger an android powered camera with bluetooth

the arduino requires some inventive hackery

Edited by SystemParanoia on Wednesday 19th July 22:04

Should be possible to have an IR blaster output from the arduino to the camera for remote shutter. You just need to know what to blast across. Not sure how quickly you can rummage that up in a week mind.

Plenty of people turn up on google searches using Arduinos to make IR blasters for TVs, AC units and the like. I can't imagine it being much different. Just have to hope you don't block line of sight!

I will say, my experience of Arduino with the ATMEGA micros are that they aren't exactly power freindly. Then again we were trying to power them on a single 9V battery. They wouldn't last long though.

you can sleep them pretty well though.

with a coin battery powered RTC hat you can set it to periodically wake to do 'stuff'