moebrowne / solar-scynchronised-timelapse

Script to take a timelapse where all pictures are taken at solar noon

Solar Synchronised Timelapse

A simple script that takes a picture every day at solar noon.

• It uses raspistill to actually take the picture but any command can be used.
• It outputs files named using an ISO-8601 date: YYYY-MM-DD.jpg (use --nameFormat to customise this).

Example

./timelapse.sh --lat 19.717586 --lon -155.547864

Arguments

-d --directory
    Directory to store images in (default: '.')

--lat
    Latitude of current position. If omitted geolocation will be attempted

-r --retries
    Maximum number of times to retry fetching solar noon date (default: '6')

--lon
    Longitude of current position. If omitted geolocation will be attempted

-h --help
    Show this help message

-f --nameFormat
    Format of image file names. Uses standard date formatting (default: '%Y-%m-%d.jpg')

Exit Codes

10  Image storage directory is not a directory
11  Image storage directory is not writable
20  Unable to do geolocation
30  Solar noon fetch retry count exceeded

SystemD Service

It's a good idea to run this as a service so if the script is killed for any reason it is restarted and can be set to start on boot.

To do both these things simply copy the included solarTimelapse.service file to /etc/systemd/system/solarTimelapse.service and run:

systemctl start solarTimelapse
systemctl enable solartTimelapse

Note this service is assuming you have cloned the code to /home/pi/solar-scynchronised-timelapse

3rd Parties

• Uses sunrise-sunset.org to fetch the solar noon time
• Uses ip-api.com to do IP based geolocation. This will be skipped if --lat and --lon are passed