One of the projects I’ve worked on for the past few years is The New American Home, produced by the National Association of Home Builders; where each year they use the latest technology and building techniques to build the most efficient and high-tech home they can. Once the house is completed, they have a grand opening at the International Builders Show with big parties and open it up to all of the convention attendees. For each new home, we produce a series of videos highlighting the construction process and the house itself.

A feature we’ve wanted to include in our videos as well as on the website has been a time-lapse of the entire construction process, from start to finish. There are a few options available for long term time-lapses, from hunting cameras to go-pro’s with an intervalometer attachment and multi-thousand dollar DSLR rigs.

Last year I found a GoPro setup that I thought would fit what we needed, it seemed simple enough. GoPro, programmable intervalometer, large rechargeable battery, solar panel, weatherproof housing. A few things went quite wrong with this setup but we’ll start with the first to go wrong. It took a long time to ship. By the time we got the setup there was no longer any time for testing/troubleshooting.

We set it up, got it on location, programmed it and hoped for the best.

Because it was using a GoPro, there was no way to check the pictures without completely taking the rig apart and retrieving the microSD card, so we let it sit for a few days. We came back to check on the camera, low and behold it had worked for about 5 hours and then stopped, never to resume taking pictures. GoPro issue? Maybe. Battery issue? Definitely not. Intervalometer? Most likely.

Plagued with issues, the camera was utterly unreliable throughout the entire year of construction.

During all this, I spent quite a bit of time researching, attempting to find a better method and I began to compile a list of some things I knew I wanted in the new time-lapse camera.

1. Cheap.

There’s no point in investing in an expensive camera setup just to have someone steal it, or have it break in the harsh environment of extremely hot Las Vegas. The cheaper the rig is, the less incentive there is to steal it, and a smaller loss if it does “go missing”.

2. Programmable.

Construction crews normally only work during the weekday on these job sites, so there’s no point in letting the camera run for the other times that nothing will be happening. (eg. weekends, anytime the sun isn’t up) Having those additional un-needed photos would add work on the back end and require us to dump the storage from the camera more frequently.

3. Solar powered.

These houses normally take about 13 months from pouring the slab until the open house party. Capturing the beginning of construction is great, but I want to get the last of the furniture being delivered too. It also wouldn’t make sense to drop a power line all the way over to where the camera needs to be set up, I want it to be as self contained as possible. No swapping batteries, and no power cords. The glorious Las Vegas sun recharging the internal battery is all it needs.

4. Plug and Play

I don’t live in Las Vegas. None of our video crew lives in Las Vegas. Only the construction site manager will be on location all the time and none of the building crew claim to know anything about cameras, electronics, or anything of the sort. Even if they do, I’d prefer for the only human interaction needed to be take the USB drive, plug it into your computer, upload the images to me, plug the drive back into the time-lapse camera, all without touching the camera rig itself.

So with the experience of the GoPro setup failing, I managed to come up with a design that utilized a small linux computer (Raspberry Pi) that would be solar powered, take the photos, and save them to an external USB drive that the builders could take and upload to us very simply.

Well the camera’s been running for about 5 months now, and been reasonably reliable. Next go around I’ll probably tweak a few things, but overall I’d say it’s been a success so far. We’ve captured the most important part (construction of the framing and walls), anything from here on out is icing on the cake. There have been a few issues, heat, and wind mostly (the camera actually got spun around due to extremely high wind speeds, yay for pictures of sand and rocks). But that was easily remedied and it’s gone back to taking it’s pictures. Over all I’m quite pleased with the setup, not the highest quality images, but they exist, and they’re better than those trail cam boxes I’ve seen.