Could you adjust the script not turn the lights on during your dark periods for photos? That way you maintain the darkness during flowering period later down the road? I didnt personally see drastic effects from having exposure to intermittent light in dark periods, but I’ve always read you want to avoid during flowering. Seems to me that it wouldn’t matter so much, interested to see thoughts.
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I could replace the cam with one with night vision.
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Or schedule it to take a pick once a day for as much as it will change.
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1 pic a day for the average grow would be a few seconds video… that wouldn’t work for timelapse
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Got it! Thanks! I thought since most plants average 60 to 120 days depending on the strain it would show a descent range but if your going for time I can see that being a issue.
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Yeah video plays back around 30 frames a second so 1 second would be a month… lol
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The more you know! Thanks for sharing!
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I wouldn’t mess with lighting. Just delete those pics.
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You are likely right and I’m likely to let it go for this grow since it is an auto flower anyway, but next grow I’ll just have it delete pics that are small file sizes indicating they are all black.
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That would be closer to a 10 minute video where once an hour would make the grow about 1-2 minutes. Then again since I will be cutting out the dark images maybe once every 15 minutes makes sense… have you done time lapse in yours? Care to share examples?
I was thinking of doing the same thing with the raspi but maybe from the side. Should be especially fun to playback the footage during flowering
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I thought about going from the side but you’d need a fairly wide angle. I also found it very practical to attach the cam to the vent with a rubber band.
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Neat! Thanks for the pic
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What software setup are you using? Just raspbian?
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The only time-lapse in the grobo that I’ve done was some stitched together daily pics:
My tent has a pi temporarily mounted for snapping a pic on demand while I was away. It’ll be on a schedule for time-lapse next grow as it was added mid-grow and is not in the best position for that currently.
Not currently using the IR camera, but might attempt in the future. Have read that it does or doesn’t affect the plant, that it only causes stretch or that it only causes the plant to start flowering early, some very inconsistent opinions. My thought is that experimentation can wait until I have a better baseline established. I’ve seen security cams watching a larger grow area but nothing in such close quarters with highly reflective walls like the Grobo has. The IR would only be on for a few seconds at a time so that also might lend toward it being less harmful.
I like what you’ve done so far and do think the pics you take will look good from where your camera has been mounted. 
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Yeah so I’m just running raspbian for the os, and then I set up a cron job to call a script i wrote that looks someinthing like this:
crontab
# take pic on 0 minute of every hour/d/m/wd
0 * * * * /home/pi/snap_pic.sh
snap_pic.sh
#!/bin/bash
# get date for name
DATE=$(date +"%Y-%m-%d_%H%M")
#snap and save
raspistill -w 1028 -h 768 -o /home/pi/timelapse/$DATE.jpg
# remove if file size indicates its all black
[[ $(find /home/pi/timelapse/$DATE.jpg -type f -size +100000c 2>/dev/null) ]] && echo true || rm -f /home/pi/timelapse/$DATE.jpg
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I don’t know how savvy you are but I was able to intercept my request to my.grobo and see what a request looked like for turning on the transparent lighting for the liquid glass. If you use BurpSuit or the like you can copy the request with all your auth tokens as a curl command to turn on the lights. The event and action params look like this:
event=switching_film_transparent&action_name=%5Bhome%5D
Unfortunately, it seems to stay on for like 10 seconds which is too long for my needs in the script I wrote that turns them on, snaps a pic, and then we want them to return to the state they were in. If you call the same event again, it just keeps it on longer. But with a little tinkering, I realized there is an event for
switching it back to opaque which should revert the lighting to whatever it was before:
event=switching_film_opaque&action_name=%5Bhome%5D
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I think I might try MobileEyeOS on the pi. Seems you can change frame rate and apply imaging filter automagically and whatnot. Will report back with my findings I get it working.
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Cool, I’m not actually shooting video. I’m taking stills twice an hour, that are compiled later into a timelapse video at any frame rate using mencoder. Super simple
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