I wanted to have a go at doing my first time-lapse project with a Raspberry Pi, so went to the Raspberry Pi website to try out their cress egg-head project.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/learning/cress-egg-heads
Having boiled my egg, I asked my canteen chef to do the delicate task of slicing the egg open for me, I found a box, coloured paper and desklamp and my science department provided a little bit of personal styling to my egg and I was away.
I was setting it all up when I thought, it looked a bit plain, so I found a few props to go into shot as well. Namely a lego duck from a course I did last year, a McDonalds toy Yoda and my colleagues felt mouse. Whenever I was in school, I planned to just tweak them a little bit, to make the video look a little more interesting.
After the first week, nothing much had happened, except the cotton wool, with seeds on, had sunk to the bottom of the egg and the seeds had just started to crack open. So I went into a second week, and this is where my finished video starts.
The following week, I was teaching my year nine class about phototropism and geotropism, so was able to use my time-lapse project to show them how the cress had grown towards the light, as the side-view of the egg gave a definite ‘leaning forward’ of each stem, although this was not obvious in the video. Meanwhile, the geotropism was displayed with the leaves growing up against gravity.
My camera settings were just as described in the cress egg-head worksheet. The Pi was set up to take 1 photo each hour for 1 whole week. I checked every day to make sure that the red camera light was on, so it was still active.
Having got the time-lapse photos, I again followed the instructions on the project worksheet to make the original video file. Finally, I put this into Serif Movieplus to add the titles, music and to tweak the play-speed a little.
scipiguy 