Taking and tweeting a photo with raspberry pi

At first I was going to create a timelapse of my cherry tree while blooming, then I decided to make a tweet once a day with a image.

Timelapse

Based on older post on how to make a Timelapse with Rapberry Pi camera module, I made small change. Rather than do a loop of x images I choose to use cronjob to run the script every 15 minutes. The script is simple and short.

#!/bin/bash

DIR=/home/pi/cherrytree
/usr/bin/raspistill -w 1920 -h 1080 -rot 180 -n -t 1000 -o $DIR/$(date -u +"%Y%m%d-%H%M-%S").jpg

Next add to your cronjob your interval, I use every 15 min.

*/15 * * * * /bin/bash /home/pi/cherry.sh >/dev/null 2>&1

Twitter bot

There's more than one way to cook an egg... There are also many ways to make a twitter bot.
I installed Twitter CLI

sudo apt-get install ruby-dev
gem install t

You will also have to create or have access to an twitter app to authorize the CLI interface.


Here is a simple script I use to take picture and tweet it. Every time I run this script, I just overwrite the image, but you can collect them by naming the file like in the script above.

#!/bin/bash
DIR=/home/pi/autotwitter
DATE=$(date -u +"%A %d %B %Y")
/usr/bin/raspistill -w 800 -h 460 -rot 180 -n -t 1000 -o $DIR/twitter.jpg
/usr/local/bin/t update 'Image of the day, '"${DATE}"'. #CherryBlossoms #raspberrypi #cli ' --file=$DIR/twitter.jpg

Once a day this script runs by cronjob at 12:01

1 12 * * * /bin/bash /home/pi/twitter.sh >/dev/null 2>&1

In addition to that, you can auto follow your followers in the same script by adding following line to the twitter script.

/usr/local/bin/t groupies | xargs /usr/local/bin/t follow

Tweets by @ArticCherry

Timelapse with Rapberry Pi camera module

As I have mentioned before I always wanted the camera module for the Raspberry Pi. Until now I had only tried out timelapse using my laptop web camera, and that gave me really crappy images. Now I have the camera module to play with and the images are way better. This is timelapse from 12:00 31. Des 2013 to 12:00 1. Jan 2014 shows 24 Hours in 5 minutes and 26 sec. including some fireworks.



This script will take image every 5 seconds 1440 times leaving you with just enough to create 60 sec timelaps video using 24 fsp

#!/bin/bash
# Timelapse controller for USB webcam
DIR=/home/user/timelapse
x=1
while [ $x -le 1440 ]; do                                                       
filename=$(date -u +"%Y%m%d-%H%M-%S").jpg                                       
raspistill -o $DIR/$filename -w 1280 -h 960 -n -t 1000
x=$(( $x + 1 ))
sleep 5;
done

Now you have 1440 images or the number you entered and next step is to create the video. Copy the images to your computer using scp or rsync, you can add that to your script if the Raspberry pi is connected to network. When you have all your images on your computer you can render video with mencoder. Install mencoder if needed.

sudo apt-get install mencoder

#!/bin/bash
DIR=/home/user/timelapse/
ls $DIR/*.jpg > list.txt
mencoder -nosound -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:aspect=16/9:vbitrate=8000000 -vf scale=640:480 -o $DIR/$(date -u +"%Y%d%m-%H%M-%S").avi -mf type=jpeg:fps=24 mf://@list.txt
rm list.txt

All ideas about improving this code are welcome.
-cheers