Raspberry Pi Time-Lapse Camera : Go time!

In the previous post I went though a few tries to get my Raspberry Pi set up to take time-laps photos. After a few false starts I had success using the instructions on the Pi foundation's website:

http://www.raspberrypi.org/learning/timelapse-setup/worksheet.md

I also found that my PI tended to pull the same IP every time it booted- even though I couldn't get it to successfully set it's network configuration to static. 

I was successful, however, getting it to automatically log onto my wireless network every time it booted.

I used the instructions on the raspberrypi.org website listed above to set up a crontab scheduled job to take a photo every minute. Initially I used their instructions just to test the function and made sure it worked. Then, I combined those instructions with some info on a crontab tutorial (located here) to set up a job where it would take a photo every minute from 7am to 6pm, every day of the week. This roughly corresponds to daylight hours in Minnesota right now. 

The line in crontab ended up to be:

* 07-18 * * * /home/pi/camera.sh 2>&1

The first position "*" indicates each minute

"07-18" indicates hours 0700 through 1800, every hour (24 hour clock)

The third position "*" is each day (# of days)

The fourth position  "*" is every month

the Fifth position "*" is every day of the week

I'm not exactly sure what the "2>&1" does....

After I had that set up, I shut the PI down, disconnected the monitor, keyboard and mouse, and taped the PI's camera to my sun porch window, and plugged it in. 

I was able to both SSH and sftp into the PI using the IP address I had written down earlier. I used the standard Nautilus file manager in Ubuntu 14.01 as the ftp client, and PuTTY as my SSH client. 

Tomorrow night I'll sftp in to the PI, and hopefully have a folder full of pictures to put together a movie with.