A little while a go, probably around October last year, a few of us were having a chat and the comment was made about the state of the roof over the quad, along with the comment: “I wouldn’t want to be underneath that in a strong wind”.
I figured that, if the quad roof was indeed moving, it should be visible in a time lapse. Now, I don’t have a camera set up on the quad 24×7… but HSBNE does… and so I was able to set up a cron job to capture a frame from it every 15 minutes and stash it.
Now, the time lapse has shown any movement in the roof of the quad to be minimal; if anything the camera itself moves more. But, I thought I’d share the time lapse video with you. I’ve thrown this together with ImageMagick and ffmpeg. Who knows, might be handy in doing promotional videos.
(Note to self: don’t use variable bitrate VP9… vimeo does not like it.)
I wish I’d known you were doing it, I’d have immediately recommended you added an alert for when the image didn’t update, because that camera crashes regularly. Watching two months of a frozen image because the camera wasn’t restarted was painful! It might be worth at least cutting those sections out of the final video.
Yeah I sort of did it quietly out of my own curiosity.
I was conscious of the pregnant pauses due to the camera crashing, but editing that out was going to be a time-consuming process. bash due to its heavy reliance on fork() is not exactly a fast scripting language when you’re processing >15000 separate JPEG images through ImageMagick; and calling sed/date to parse the timestamped file name into something more human-friendly.
It’s sad we lost some significant portions of @narfdreyer’s tiny house being built in those crashes, but that’s life I guess.
Maybe a smarter downloader script than calling wget from cron might give us more scope to do duplicate frame detection and raise an alarm if we see 288 near identical copies of the same frame. (Might also avoid the race condition that sometimes sees me download 0-byte frames too.)
(Might also avoid the race condition that sometimes sees me download 0-byte frames too.)