Watching Grass Grow

ID:36447
 
Nov 7 2007, 7:09 am
I've mentioned puppycam a time or two before. I still haven't written up the full blog post about it, but that will come later.

For now, it suffices to say that we have three puppycams mounted on the exterior of the house, watching the front door, the side yard, and the back yard. One of the many uses for these cameras is to produce a daily time lapse movie of the events from any day when we're away from the house. Not only can we check up on the dogs in real time over the web, but we can later watch the day's movie and see what bad things they did that we missed. This entire system will be explained in the aforementioned blog post, sometime in the future.

It wasn't too long after setting this up that I thought it would be neat to put together long term time lapse movies of the landscaping around our house. The front yard, in particular was quite a jungle and seemed to grow quickly. It would be neat to watch this growth happen rapidly over time.

So I setup a new script on the computer to run every day and:
  • Compute the clock time of high noon
  • Wait until that time
  • Command each of the three exterior cameras to move to a preset "yard viewing position"
  • Take a snapshot
  • Move the cameras back to their "natural" viewing positions

Using these snapshots, I could combine them into a time lapse movie and watch plants come to life. After a few weeks I quickly realized that noon wasn't the best time of day — while it offers the most light, it also suffers from the largest variance in overall light levels from day to day: one day might be bright and sunny, the next overcast and rainy. So I added a sunset snapshot, where light levels are fairly constant regardless of cloud cover.

Here is the sunset movie for the last year:



Unfortunately Youtube compressed the heck out of the movie, resulting in much less quality than my 47 MB copy on the computer. Oh well! If you look closely, you still might notice a few things:
  • We got a gardener soon after the sunset series starts. No more front yard jungle.
  • A few sprinkler valves were repaired in the front (coming soon to a homeimprovement blog post near you!)
  • Nice growth spurt on the side around March
  • Installation of a paving stone patio area (also waiting to be blogged)

Speaking of time lapse movies, I have another idea that I'm dying to try. We're driving to St. Louis for Thanksgiving, so I'm seriously thinking of putting the Macbook on the dashboard of the car and setting it up to take a snapshot every couple of seconds. That could make a really interesting time lapse movie, zooming half way across the country in mere minutes. Of course, it means that nobody can use the computer while riding in the car, and that may not be too popular with the other passengers.
Nov 7 2007, 8:40 am
I have two reactions:

1) Please report to the Nerd Detention Center for your mandatory re-education.

2) How come, on shows like 24, terrorists never set one of these cameras up to observe their prisoners? Instead they leave them to their own devices, then do an hourly check where some burly guard pops his head in so he can be bludgeoned/seduced/trapped.

I demand smarter terrorists!
Nov 7 2007, 9:11 am
I have one reaction.

1) Dream Theater ftw.
Nov 7 2007, 1:00 pm
That's cool. The view of the house along the side was the most interesting for me. You could see the vines grow down. One of the vines died suddenly, then a spurt of sunny days let them all regrow.
Nov 7 2007, 1:30 pm
I also noticed on the porch that the hanging chimes gained sentience at some point and escaped.

Mike may have captured the beginning of the end of the world!
Nov 7 2007, 2:26 pm
I think the traveling lapse would be very interesting. Screw popularity with your measly few car guests and take immortal popularity on the Interwebs! :)
Nov 8 2007, 2:33 am
Watch at the beginning of the video in his driveway, it's much more interesting. The car being in the driveway in different positions and not in the driveway actually looks like it's smashing itself into the garage at some points. Much like we used to smash dinky cars together for fun.
Nov 8 2007, 3:52 am
Deadron wrote:
I also noticed on the porch that the hanging chimes gained sentience at some point and escaped.

Mike may have captured the beginning of the end of the world!

Oh my god! You're right!

GLOBAL SENITENT WINDCHIME REVOLT! GET YOUR WELDING TORCHES PEOPLE!

Nov 8 2007, 1:50 pm
ZOMG *pulls out a pitchfork and a torch* TO THE GET AWAY CAR *hops in a mustang* PREPARE TO BE TERMINATED WIND CHIMES I ISH GOJNNA EAT JOO

Later, I was seen by my neighbor, and I was sent to a mental institution. What a happy ending :D
Nov 11 2007, 5:48 pm
Hiead wrote:
I think the traveling lapse would be very interesting. Screw popularity with your measly few car guests and take immortal popularity on the Interwebs! :)

I think I have a solution - I was able to modify my image capture program to use my DV camera via FireWire. It was actually pretty easy to do. So the camera can sit on the dash while the laptop remains usable for other purposes.

Now the only problem is that both the camera and the laptop need power, but the vehicle we're probably taking only has one available outlet. Unfortunately that camera doesn't use power over the Firewire bus. Could be a bit of a juggling act switching the two between battery and external power to keep everything running constantly.

Of course, this would all be much easier with a cheap USB webcam. But that wouldn't be any fun!
Nov 15 2007, 8:41 am
I love how the leaves disappear on their own. I wish mine did that.