Portable Digital Timelapse Photography?

Bakajin asks: "The posting about the camera speedometer hack reminded me of my interest in portable time lapse photography. I wondered if the astute Slashdot crowd can make some suggestions for a very portable digital time-lapse system. I was initially thinking about a PDA connected to a small web-camera. I'll hack my own code if I have to, but I'd prefer to have something off the shelf or not involving too much work. Any suggestions on the PDA/camera/software combo or any different system?"

Comments

Handspring + eyemodule

[Pathwalker]

Go for a Handspring Visor, and an EyeModule or an EyeModule 2.

They both include a nice time lapse feature, which keeps the pda powered down as much as possible to avoid draining the battery.

gphoto

[jjshoe]

if you have a laptop and a digital camera check out gphoto.org i made a script for taking time lapse pictures, its hard to estimate time between for sure because it is possible for communication errors and what not, but take a peak...

#!/bin/bash
# comon, do i need to comment that?

# you need to touch count.file and on the topline insert the number
# 0 for instalation purposes and thats it

# 1: zork is used to create a loop so the program continuosly runs until
# 1: killed
zork=0
while [ $zork = 0 ]; do
#

# 2: check to see if count.file exists, if not, create it and insert the
# 2: number one at the top
ls count.file &> /dev/null
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
touch count.file
echo 1 > count.file
fi
#

# 3: the variable count is used in naming pictures and count.file stores the
# 3: current number to use
count=`/bin/cat count.file`
#

# 4: if the count is less then 1 set it to one (used to initialy set the
# 4: variable to one and to never change it from there, a simple count = 1
# 4: at the top would not work, because you would overwrite old pictures
if [ $count == 0 ]; then
count=1
fi
#

# 5: tells gphoto to take a picture and save it as #.jpg, when that command
# 5: has completly finished gphoto then deletes image #1 which is always
# 5: the number of the image on the camera (be sure to delete all images off of
# 5: the camera before using this program
gphoto -p $count.jpg ; gphoto -d 1
#

# 6: add 1 to the current value of count
count=`expr $count + 1`
#

# 7: write the echo of count to count.file for future recall
echo -n $count > count.file
#

# 8: set the following value (in seconds) for how often you want to take
# 8: pictures
sleep 1
echo 1
sleep 1
echo 2
sleep 1
echo 3
sleep 1
echo 4

# 9: again, do i need to cover this one?
done

# written by jjshoe@hotmail.com
# any and all comments apreciated

(ignore this, fucking slashdot is bitching about to few characters per line, there's nothing i can do about it without murdering my script except to sit here and rant and rave hoping to get this post to go through, two few characters per line, 25.1? what kind of bullshit is this? i mean, this is preventing me from making a decent post, and im mighty pissed off, slashdot needs to find a better way to deal with trolls because they are now disabling the site for regular upstanding users)

Try the Minolta Dimage 7

[pwagland]

Try looking at the Dimage 5/7/7i from Minolta. I have the 7 and it does time lapse photography. You can set it to do 1 photo a minute up to 1 photo an hour (from memory, I don't have the manual here...) and you can take as many photos as fit into your compact flash...which with a 1Gb microdrive is a lot, even at 2500*2000(rougly 500 images). At 640*480 it just goes into the realms of stupid....

Cheers, Paul