Issue
Trying to take a photo with a raspberry pi 3b plus camera. We are sending on a weather balloon into near space and need to take photos every 3 minutes and save all the photos. I don't know if we should save that to a file or some other source. Also, we need a photo every 3 minutes. Please help!!
Solution
You can try making a test image capture tagged with the date and time like this:
raspistill -dt -o /home/pi/image-%d.jpg
which should result in an image in /home/pi
like this:
-rw-r--r-- 1 pi pi 4397351 Nov 12 08:28 image-1112082809.jpg
Satisfy yourself regarding its quality and size. Then you can get an image taken every 3 minutes by adding an entry into your crontab like this:
*/3 * * * * raspistill -dt -o /home/pi/image-%d.jpg
In case you are unfamiliar with cron
, you can edit your crontab
using the command crontab -e
and choosing the easiest editor which is nano
. If you want to list and check your cron
entries without editing them, use crontab -l
In case you are unfamiliar with raspistill
, you can get help on its syntax and options with raspistill --help
.
Just FYI, there's a veritable treasure trove of material about High Altitude Ballooning with Raspberry Pis on Dave Akerman's pages here.
Answered By - Mark Setchell Answer Checked By - Gilberto Lyons (WPSolving Admin)