On Thursday it was 64° when I ran outside. Then we had a winter storm come through the weekend.

Since it’s rare to get a storm this late in the year, I thought it would be neat to document it.

My makeshift ruler and stand was a complete failure; it blew over, spun around, and wasn’t readable. I’m happy with the rest of the project though. I really like the worms crawling around, seeing the water freeze, and how the lines of the bricks come through.

I used a Raspberry Pi Zero W and the camera module.

In order to get images for the time-lapse I added cron job that ran a bash script every minute, which in turn called raspistill to capture a photo. It was very easy to set up. Here is the bash script.

#!/bin/bash

DATE=$(date +"%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%S")

raspistill -vf -hf -o /home/pi/time-lapse/images/$DATE.jpg

This is the line I added to my crontab.

* * * * * /home/pi/time-lapse/capture.sh

Before transferring all of the images to my Mac, I compressed the images folder.

tar -czvf images.tar.gz images

Then, from my Mac I could grab them by doing a secure copy.

scp pi@pi.local:/home/pi/time-lapse/images.tar.gz images.tar.gz

In order to stitch everything together, I imported the images into iMovie, changed the crop style to fill, and set a 0.01 second duration.