A Megapixel Time-lapse Camera System

Introduction
The NSLU2 running OpenWRT and the QuickCam Pro 9000 combine to make a very versatile device. In this post I’m going to describe how to use them as a time-lapse camera which takes photos every ten seconds at 1600×1200 resolution and stores them on a flash drive. The photos occupy anywhere from 80K to 400K each depending on the complexity of the scene. This means that around 10,000 to 15,000 will fit on a 4GByte flash drive, corresponding to 20-40 hours of coverage. All that is required is an NSLU2, a UVC-compatible webcam, a flash drive, and an OpenWRT firmware build, which is available here. A brief sample movie (30 seconds, 8.5Mbytes, DivX) is available here.

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Further notes on the NSLU2 and QuickCam Pro 9000

I have been playing around with the webcam firmware that was the subject of my last post and have a number of random notes that I should put up here on using it.

A High-Resolution IP Webcam

Web cams are fairly ubiquitous things these days and by no means expensive. They can be good or bad depending on how much money you want to spend, but there is one almost-universal rule, which is that they connect to a host PC over USB. IP-based cameras that connect to a LAN via an RJ45 connector or wirelessly over 802.11 are quite a bit more useful, because they can be put almost anywhere, but they tend to cost a surprising amount and not provide much resolution. A low-end one like the LevelOne FCS1030 is NZ$260, and they go a lot more expensive than that. For example, the wireless D-Link DCS5300 sells for NZ$930 and it only does 320×240 pixels.