A Raspberry Pi 3B, 4 or 0W, a Pi 8MP camera with an IMX219 sesnor and a an M12 GoPro 220 degree lens
from here https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32430326520.html?spm=a2g0s.9042311.0.0.39e04c4dEm7x8C.
A 1-Wire DS18B20 temperature sensor is included. AllSky Cam costs about $100 without a case.
Here I used a re-purposed Clinton Electronics VX50 with the original electronics removed.
I put a buck regulator board in the case and modified the LAN cable to permit 12V DC to be fed up the ethernet cable so I only need one cable to the device. You can connect via WiFi but you still need to provide power. I chose 12V because it is easy to derive the neccessary 5V for the Pi over longer distances.
However it is quite possible to use a Raspberry Pi 0W and run the whole device from a USB power supply.
Data transfer is not supported via the USB port.
The software runs under Raspian. I'm using Stretch and Buster. I have had a huge amount of help from the folks at the Raspberry Pi forum because I am very far from being a programmer. Thanks guys.
In use the camera takes a single 800 x 600 jpg image every 2 minutes in daytime and 4 minutes at night. Once every 3 minutes it takes the image to concatenate into one of two videos for day and night. The videos run at 5 fps with the aim of making two daily videos of about 30 seconds each. The device does not keep data once it has been depassed. This means you can run the AllSky Cam from an 8GB or smaller microSD card,
The camera alone is not capable of producing usable images from all day and night ambient light levels so
I use sunwait https://github.com/risacher/sunwait to provide daily twilight (dawn and dusk), sunrise and sunset times.
The resultant times may be adjusted to allow exposure switching via cron to provide differing sets of
exposure arguments to raspistill. Sunwait needs the latitude and longitude and GMT offset to provide correct times.
The still image contains a text banner that displays, from left to right:
A very simple menu system is provided that runs equally simply on PC and phones. The PI has a lightppd webserver and may be accessed as a normal webpage.
THIS PROJECT RUN IN ROOT SO PLEASE MAKE SURE THAT YOU INSTALL USING ROOT
Most of this information came from https://www.dronkert.net/rpi/webcam.html which is what this project is based upon.
apt-get upgrade apt-get dist-upgrade rpi-update # If needed. reboot
add w1-gpio w1-therm to the end of the file if this has not already been done by raspi-config.
apt install ffmpeg
nano /boot/config.txt add disable_camera_led=1 dtoverlay=w1-gpio to the end of the file. This may have been done by raspi-config.
apt-get install lighttpd php php-cgi php-gd
lighty-enable-mod fastcgi lighty-enable-mod fastcgi-php service lighttpd force-reload echo '<?php phpinfo(); ?>' | tee /var/www/phpinfo.php
Make a directory in /home called /home/allsky mkdir /home/allsky
Make a directory called /home/allsky/pics and for the day and night images mkdir /home/allsky/pics mkdir /home/allsky/pics/day mkdir /home/allsky/pics/night
chmod 755 /home/allsky/sunwait/sunwait cp /home/allsky/sunwait/sunwait /usr/bin chmod 755 /home/allsky/webcam chmod 755 /home/allsky/pics/*.sh
chmod 755 /home/allsky/sunwait/sunwait cp /home/allsky/sunwait/sunwait /usr/bin
Download sunwait from https://github.com/risacher/sunwait Build the program via the make file - it works perfectly Copy sunwait cp /home/allsky/sunwait/sunwait /usr/local/bin/sunwait
reboot
nano /home/allsky/webcam Change the variables lat and lon to reflect your staion, save and exit the file. Run webcam with: /home/allsky/webcam
Webcam will now run and produce images and video automatically.
The Raspberry Pi Zero W offers a very cheap way on building this AllSKy Camera. To accomodate the Pi Zero W's lower processing power a couple of mini changes help it out.
1). Edit /home/allsky/webcam and change lines 131 and 132
making sure that there is at least a six (6) mite gap between them with twiSetVid being the highter number.
This makes sure that at camera and night video switch over the raspistill buffer is clear.
2). Edit the webcam file change the value of shotN to 5 at line 143. This makes sure that night images have time to be processed completely before starting a new image.
127 # Shifts camera mode time at Evening Twilight / NIght 128 # For the night camera mode 129 # HH:MM 130 twiSet=-00:00 # Advance or delay when the camera switches from day to night. 131 twiSetP=-00:09 # Camera switch time. Needs to be at least 1 minute EARLIER than the Video switch time. 132 twiSetVid=-00:15 # Offset advance or delay for the Video Day / Night switch. 133 134 # Number of minutes between movie frame concatenation. Default here is 10 [minutes] 135 concat=10 136 137 # Minutes between movie image copies. Default is 3. 138 # raspistill can take up to 1 minute 45 seconds to process a night time image. 139 cap=3 140 141 # Interval for raspistill to take shots. Night time needs to be longer since raspistill needs longer at night to complete. 142 shotD=2 # Daytime shot interval. Default is 2 [minutes] 143 shotN=5 # Night time shot interval. It can take raspistill up to 1 minute 45 seconds to process a night time image. Default is 4