Raspberry Pi Extended Time Lapse Camera (with battery power!)

Learning Outcomes:

In this tutorial we will turn a Raspberry Pi into a time lapse camera that takes pictures at a preset interval. The Raspberry Pi will be battery powered so that we can install it off grid and get some great time lapses of places you might not want to leave your expensive SLR camera running at. What makes this time lapse Raspberry Pi different to other tutorials is that we will be using a Sleepy Pi board to do some power management. In this way we can extend the life of the battery allowing our Raspberry Pi to operate in the field for longer periods of time so we can get longer and more spectacular time lapses! How will we do this? Simple! We will be turning on the Raspberry Pi, taking a picture, and then shutting down right after. In this way the Raspberry Pi is only consuming battery power while it is on and taking a picture. Not while it is just idling, increasing the amount of time the time lapse camera can work on battery power. To do this we will use the Sleepy Pi board, this is basically a ATMEL 328p processor (same as an arduino UNO), a RTC, and a power management circuit in one! The Sleepy Pi is capable of taking a power input and then feeding it to the Raspberry Pi through a switch and into the GPIO port. We will be writing an Arduino program that controls this switch and sets the duration between our time lapse pictures. This tutorial is a bit long and some experience with computers, Arduino, or Raspberry Pi will help, however I have tried to make this simple enough for a first timer to follow and implement! Continue Reading →