This script uses the technique of taking a picture and then sleeping a fixed length of time. This can lead to unevenness if the CPU time for each loop is not constant. One alternative is to wait until, say, the time is evenly divisible by 10 seconds with something like

(This is adapted from something I did on a Mac, and hasn’t been tested or run on the Pi. You can test it by setting dt to 60 seconds and take a time lapse of an accurate clock: the second hand should be the same place in all the pictures.)

The tricks are:
date +%s — gives the time in seconds since beginning of 1970
expr ${dt} – \( ${now} % ${dt} \) — % is the remainder operator, so this gives the number of seconds until the remainder is zero again.

#! /usr/bin/env bash
cd `dirname $0`
dt=10

ROLL=$(cat /var/tlcam/series)
SAVEDIR=/var/tlcam/stills

for (( j = 0 ; j < 9999999 ; j ++ ))
do
now=`date +%s`
left=`expr ${dt} – \( ${now} % ${dt} \)`
sleep $left
filename=$ROLL-$(date -u +"%d%m%Y_%H%M-%S").jpg
/opt/vc/bin/raspistill -o $SAVEDIR/$filename
done

Wonderful – the four seasons in one day!

Sweet!

You caught a ‘moving’ rainbow at 2:38 – don’t think I’ve ever seen that on a time-lapse before :)

Wonderful! All it needs is a soundtrack – “Little Fluffy Clouds”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Fluffy_Clouds

Very relaxing. The rainbow was a pleasant surprise.

Can you tell me how much space those 5515 files took up on the SD card? I’m just wondering how long it would be possible to run for if i was mains powered.

While this is a pretty good stab at time-lapse using a raspberry pi, I would like to see if it could be smoother using a more optimal shutter time and interval. Some of the best time-lapse work I’ve seen has come from Adonis Pulatus found here https://vimeo.com/adonispulatus.

Adonis has found that using a 1 second interval and dragging the shutter to 1/2 second is the best for most daylight situations. The key is ‘dragging the shutter’ as this will smooth out things like birds, planes, or people passing in front of the lens.

In many cases a neutral density filter will be needed to compensate for the ‘over’ exposure of the long shutter time. It would be handy too to understand what exposure controls are available on this camera.

Check out his work at the above web site to see what I mean.

Hope this helps,
-Phil Loarie

How fast can this thing take pictures/frames? I was wondering if I could use the time-lapse command and just set it to a very low delay (100fps) to capture High-speed video. Of course, then I would have a bunch of pictures that I would have to sort out. So I guess it would be better to have some way of doing this with video. I’ll look around to see if there would be a good/better way to do this.
Andy

If only there was a case to protect the camera and a better way to connect to the board (without a dangling flat cable) it would be perfect, really…!

A small cable that could be soldered to the board and put inside a standard raspberry pi box and the camera in a protected box, like a real cam, with a removable cable that would connect to the raspberry pi case…

I got my camera yesterday.
Glued a small strip of plastic to a 8pin header that fits on the gpio. blutaked the camera to the plastic,
Reasonably secure.

First test after receive my camera module.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2v40zUSi7zI

Is there a way to take stills “NOW” ie without the delay of 5 or 6 seconds. I want to synchronise several cameras so that they all take a picture at exactly the same moment from many different angles?

Hi,
here my first try

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wl7rxBGnrVI&hd=1

Time laps:
Rapberry Pi Camera 27.05.2013
4,61GB – 3.780 Pictures
Resolution: 1920×1080