To be able to review what is likely to be a very lengthy process, I have decided to record the entire construction using a time lapse camera. After reviewing what’s available, I purchased a Mobius ActionCam.

The Mobius is cheap, small, light, and very configurable. The user community has produced a small utility that configures the camera via USB. There are a variety of modes available including video time lapse, but the one I’m interested is image time lapse mode. In this mode, when the image taking interval is set to greater than 5 minutes, the camera will turn off in between taking images, vastly extending the battery life over the usual video mode.

Thanks to Public Lab user tonyc for posting about use of the Mobius in long term time lapse applications.

Protected yet panoptic

Ideally the camera would be located in the lower garden looking back up at the site and house. Since the Mobius isn’t waterproof and I couldn’t locate a waterproof housing, an indoor location is required. Fortunately the bathroom on the second floor overlooks the site and after removing the fly-wire screen, the window presented the perfect location.

I used the Mobius’ tripod mount to secure it to a length of wood and glued some rubber on the ends to help wedge it into the window frame.

All set! We’ll need to work out how to convert the thousands of 3.5 megapixel images into a reasonably sized video at some point, but for now, it’s time for some demolition!