I wanted three things: a photo of my plants every 15 minutes, a way to see the newest one when I wasn’t home, and a timelapse at the end.
- Photos. A short Python script using Picamera2, started by cron every 15 minutes. It keeps a counter in a text file so the images are numbered in order. It also frees the camera if an earlier run crashed, because otherwise the camera stayed locked after a restart.
- Uploads. rclone pushes the newest image to Google Drive every 15 minutes, and another cron job checks the Wi-Fi every five minutes and reconnects if it has dropped.
- Timelapse. A script that stitches all the images into a video.
To be honest, the upload part was mostly a matter of following a couple of guides.