Easy Time-lapse Video via Phone and Command Line

A good time-lapse video can be useful visual documentation, and since [Tommy]’s phone is the best camera he owns he created two simple shell scripts to grab time-lapse images and assemble them into a video. [Tommy]’s work is just the glue between two other things: an app that turns the phone into an IP camera with a web server on the local network, and the ability to grab a still image from that server on demand.

The app he uses for his iPhone normally serves video but has an undocumented feature that allows single frames to be downloaded by adding ‘/photo’ to the end of the URL, but the ability to get a still image is a common feature on IP camera apps for smartphones. His capture script (GitHub repository here) should therefore need only minor changes to work with just about any IP camera app.

Perching a phone over a workspace and using it to create a time-lapse with a couple of shell scripts is a great example of combining simple tools to get better functionality. It could be a good way to get additional use out of an older smartphone, too. Heck, even older dumbphones can still get some use out of them; Shmoocon 2017 brought us details on rolling your own 1G network.

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