Suggestions on Growth cycle timelapse feature

Software Farmware
1

I’d like some advice from the hive collective. I’m going to start a grow cycle of flowers. And I’m going to make a mosaic timelapse of the entire process. Here is my pseudo code. Any guidance would be appreciated.

  1. Capture picture of each flower
  2. Stitch into a mosaic
  3. Download frame to the computer
  4. Repeat on interval
  5. After harvest stitch mosaic frames to video

For step (1) I can create a custom sequence or Farmware plug-in that steps to each cell in the garden grid and takes a picture.

Step (2) stitch images into a mosaic, I could do this on the FarmBot Pi (if the proper python image processing packages are available)

Step (3)… I haven’t seen an email with an attachment in sequence, am I missing something?

Step (4) add user defined frame rate interval

Step (5) stitch frames into videos using online software, or Blender3D

Thanks in advance for the advice.

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2

Hey @Sjamesparsons,
that sounds interesting but I’ve got a few questions:

you mean that all pictures of that day will be added to one big picture?

How are you planning to do this? Currently there is no function that downloads the pictures directly to your PC.

So how many pictures are made in a given time (f.e. once a day)?

3

Hi @Ascend, thanks for the fast feedback

(2) The goal is to make one giant picture of my garden, stitched together from a lot of little pictures. The number of times a day this is done will depend on the repeat input from the user.
stitched photo mosaic

(3) That’s a good question, have any suggestions? I could write a local script that grabs images (which isn’t efficient) or figure out a farmware plug-in. Depending on how many images are generated, I could just download all, daily (which isn’t efficient).

(4) Each frame will be stitched from a lot of little images. Let’s say my garden will be 3 x 10 pictures, that will be 30 pictures. I’m thinking if I can capture each photo within 1 minute I could snap the whole garden in 1/2 hours. And repeat per user input.

Thanks

4

Alright, just to understand your workflow:
The pictures are made by the raspberry and saved on its local store. Then the pictures get stiched into the mosaic picture by a python script that runs on the raspberry. Then the finished single mosaic picture will be sent to a hard drive or your computer, so you can create a timelapse video later with all the pictures when the plants are harvested. Is that right?

5

Yup, that’s the plan. What do you think?

6

Sounds like a good plan. The good thing is, that photo stiching seems to be supported by the already used OpenCV tool. Here are some overviews and guides that I found in a quick search Image Stitching with OpenCV and Python, Image Mosaic (aka Image Stitching).

If I remember correctly, the pictures that are made from the Take-Photo farmware are not permanently saved, since they are uploaded to the Web-App/cloud and not being used locally anymore. But its not a big deal to modify that farmware to save them additionally to another location.
Did you think about saving the pictures and the finished mosaic directly to an USB stick that is plugged into the raspberry? So when the harvest is done you can easily unplug the USB stick and copy the mosaic pictures to your PC where you process them further.

7

Thanks Ascend, this is a fantastic idea. Saving it directly to the RPi USB stick is a great idea. I’ll keep you posted with my progress

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