“Ever wanted to do time-lapse video but don’t want to buy a expensive camera or use your iPhone? Raspberry Pi to save the day!
Thanks for taking the time to view my project! I’m a big plant person so I have a bunch of plants and wanted to do some time lapses on them. Watch them grow and move around! I didn’t have a nice camera that was capable of incremental photos. In the past I have used my iPad mini to do some time lapses but those were just over a couple hours. I want long term like days into weeks. So I decided to use a Raspberry Pi I had laying around and see what I could make with that. I first started using a webcam but the quality was poor. I upgraded to the RPI Camera v2 and got MUCH better quality photos. It took some tweaking of the settings in raspistill to get photos just the way you want them.
First we can hookup the hardware. Since there are not many neopixels, I just used the 5v rail on the RPi to power them. I know, I know they can draw a lot for the RPi… but if you want to use a external 5v source, make sure you connect the grounds together. Now the complicated part. We need to shift the logic from the RPI from 3.3v to 5v for the neopixels. I use the 74AHCT125 to achieve this. I included a wire diagram in the attachment section. It pretty easy though. Once we connect that up to our neopixels, connect the data line going to the input of the 74AHCT125 to RPI - GPIO 18. Then use a small wire jumper and connect ground to GPIO 23 to tell our script we want flash. I think thats it for hardware…”