Having a still live picture is cool, but one thing we tend to ignore for obvious reasons, is the plant's movements. Plants actually move a lot during the day and night, it's too slow for us to notice, but becomes very clear once at high speed.
So that's the point of this, take a pic every 10 minutes, then compile all those pics into videos, daily and weekly.
One of the things with movements, is they can allow you to spot something wrong before it shows up.

For example, let’s have a look at this plant, you can see how the leaves tend to have a “breathing” motion.
We’ll see in the next frames how it goes when it is thirsty.

Now here’s a sad plant. The problem here is that it’s getting thirsty. This appears quite clearly because there are no more breathing motions. And the leaves will tend to go downward.

Other issues can be spotted too, lack of nutrient stops all movements for example.

Now look how it looks after being watered:)

Another fun thing to notice on timelapses that could avoid watering issues, is the soil color. It’s color turns lighter as the soil gets dryer.
Usually the soil color suddenly turns lighter, that means the plant will start suffering from lack of water a few hours later.
All this to say, you should definitely have a live cam with daily timelapse video generation in your grow box.

Alright let’s get into it, the first step is to get the right hardware.
The live camera is mostly composed of two components, on one side a tiny computer called a Raspberry PI, and a camera with wide angle.
The one we recommend is the PI zero W, and a camera with wide angle and infrared lighting for night shots (plants move a lot during the night too).

The raspberry pi setup will be our first step, because it takes some steps, we’ll move that to a separate guide that you can find under here.

It is recommended to have the camera already attached to the PI at that step, it won’t be able to use it if not plugged on boot.

Aaaaaaand we’re now ready to install the SuperGreenLive2 software that will turn our useless raspberry PI into an awesome companion for our grow diary app.

Re-connect to the raspberry PI with putty if not already.

Let’s do a quick test to make sure the connection to the camera is right.

Type:

libcamera-jpeg -o cam.jpg

Then type:

ls cam.jpg

No error should be displayed by any of those commands.

Now to the installation of SuperGreenLive, copy/paste:

curl -sL https://github.com/supergreenlab/SuperGreenLive2/releases/download/latest/install.sh | sudo bash

This will go on for a little while, and you shouldn’t have anything to do but wait. Get yourself a large glass of water to stay hydrated.

Alright we’re now done with the software installation, let’s set up our raspberry PI + camera inside the box.

You can craft something with pieces of cardboard and some hot glue, but for this tutorial we’ll use the small camera holder we’ve designed, you can either download the stl files for free and print it yourself, or buy our pre-printed parts here (Coming soon)

We made a dedicated guide for this step, please check it out:

Alright we now have our camera in place, let’s start a timelapse!

Power the raspberry pi, let it work for about 90s to fully start, then with your browser, go to:

http://raspberrypi.local:8081

That will open the live cam setup graphic interface for easier setup.

Start by logging into your sgl account, if you don’t have one yet please create one with the SGL app at https://www.supergreenlab.com/app

Once logged in you will be presented with the plants you have already created, if you don’t have any yet, head to the app to create one now, then refresh the page.

This screen allows to setup the camera focus and orientation.

The focus can be tuned by turning the camera’s lens, turn it just a few degrees then monitor the live view, you will notice there might be a few seconds of lag, so let the picture stabilize before turning more.

If the picture has the wrong orientation (ie upside down), use the button under the liveview to reorient it.

And we’re now on the final screen, this screen just shows which plant is on the timelapse and captures a frame from the camera.

There are four buttons at the top:

• Skip night: Uncheck it to enable liveview, only useful if you have a camera with night vision.
• Live cam: Shows the live view screen again.
• Download: Downloads the pics for the last 24h.
• Reset: Allows to start another timelapse with the same setup.

Now the live server is set up and running, it will take a pic every 10 minutes and save it on the server.

You can have a look at the latest pic from the app, go to your plant, tap the eye icon at the top right corner.
If there is no pic yet you might need to wait a few more minutes.

And now the app will generate a time-lapse every 24 hours and every end of week!
This way you can have a quick glance at how the plant behaved the previous day.

As a reminder:

• healthy plants have a breathing motion during the day, and some sort of twisting motion when the night falls.
• Thirsty plants will only have downward motion, no more breathing. That usually means you still have a few hours before it becomes critical.
• Lack of nutrient (and probably other issues) will stop any motion, the time-lapse shows the plant totally still, that means it will maybe start showing signs of deficiencies few days later.

We are still learning what are all visible symptoms on time-lapses, let us know if you spot something interesting. Spoiler: we'll then try to work on image processing and AI to detect issues automatically.

Enjoy your daily and weekly timelapses:)

Need help troubleshooting?

Join the SuperGreenLab discord server for 24/24 support from us and the community!