Solar powered on/off line timelapse photography

Introduction

Create offline timelapse photographer power by solar power using Raspberry Pi. When the Raspi connects to the internet, it will start transferring the images to a net storage. The uploaded photos will be then shown on a separate web page. Also, by triggering GPIO pins, Raspberry Pi will send a separate photo directly to the net storage. These photos are used to adjust the position and alignment of the camera.

Connect to internet

My Raspberry Pi 4 uses WPA to store wifi and ethernet data at /etc/wpa_supplicant/XXXX.conf file. It includes

country=ee
update_config=1
network={
        ssid="My Phone"
        psk="very secret passphrase"
}

The internet connection can be shut down using sudo ip link set wlan0 down which mimics the procedure that my hotspot is not nearby. ip a or using ping you can verify that there is no internet connection. When connecting to back to internet [up] (or setting the hotspot on) everything should work. However, for some reason my Raspi did not connect to the internet, but by using sudo dhcpcd it works.

dhcpcd

Thus, I need to check if dhcpcd is working. This is easily done by checking /etc/resolv.conf file. If no internet is connected there is only a trivial nameserver ip address.

Note Iwconfig and ifconfig are deprecated.

Solar power

Things needed

• Solar panel
• Solar charging regulator (some panels include regulator)
• Battery: 12V or 5V power bank.
• USB car powered adapter

Or Solar power hat. Also, there exists batteries with included solar panel.

Battery

Size: 10000 mAh works 5 hours with 2 amps current. See https://learn.pi-supply.com/battery-levels/ for approximating time with different tasks.

Lead Acid:

Li-Ion: Cheaper but larger.

Li-Po:

12V battery.