Intro

This started off as a simple Intervalometer. I pretty quickly came to the conclusion that, without motion detection, a naive implementation of an intervalometer is kind of useless. You just wind up with either a lot of pictures or you miss the really important ones.

So, this script now has some configurable parameters to tweak the motion sensitivity. As long as there is movement, it takes pictures continuously and uploads them to Picasa/Google Plus Photos. (Python based motion detect code originally from here).

Picasa was chosen as an endpoint because photos less than 2048x2048 do not count towards your storage. Plus Google kindly stitches together similar photos to create an animated gif, which is pretty awesome!

Features

• Configurable motion detection sesitivity.
• Automatically stop monitoring and exit after a set time (makes it easy to start from cron daily)
• Monitor only parts of the image for motion (thanks Kesthal)
• Automatically create new albums on picasa every 1000 photos.

PreRequisites

• RaspberryPi with a camera board :)

• raspistill installed and configured (part of RaspiCam)

    http://www.raspberrypi.org/camera
  

• Python 2.x

• Python Imaging Library (PIL)

    apt-get install python-imaging-tk
  

• gdata-python-client, downloaded and installed

    https://developers.google.com/gdata/articles/python_client_lib#library
    
    tar -zxvf gdata-2.0.18.tar.gz 
    cd gdata-2.0.18
    sudo python setup.py install
  

TODO

• It would be nice to allow uploads to other online providers.
• The code definitely needs a bit of a cleanup.