Time lapse a house raising project

[Q™]

I have a friend who lives in a house near the water. His house is being raised onto 10-foot high pilings. We would like to time-lapse record the entire project, but we're wondering if it is cost prohibitive. He's a super MacGyver kind of guy. He can place a 20-foot post in an adjacent lot to film the project. However, the power will be off for the duration of the project. He has deep cycle batteries which he can set up to recharge with solar panels. I have a 4-port POE switch and a laptop which will run Blue Iris to capture the video from a single 2MP or 4MP camera. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to accomplish this or any suggestions to make is as cost effective as possible?

Thanks fellas.

 

[nayr]

Go on amazon/ebay and buy a nice cheap, old Cannon point and shoot camera.. then load it up with the OpenSource Canon Hack Development Kit

you can setup scripts to save timelapse photos durring the work hours..

you can do some really cool shit with it, like detect lightning and photograph it.. Ive used it for timelapse of plants growing and it did great, but I had it on a hardwired power source so it'd work non-stop for 6 months.

 

[Q™]

I appreciate the advice Nayr, but if I do this I'm definitely going to do it with an IP camera. No offense and thanks for the reply. Much appreciated.

 

[nayr]

why? you can get a really nice 16MP Cannon camera with 30x zoom for the same price as a pretty standard IP camera.. you dont need video for timelapse, or a network, or electrical power, or a nvr, etc.

seems to me that you have the impression that IP Cameras are a hammer, and every problem requiring imagery is a nail... common fallacy made by people with big hammers.

 

[Q™]

 

[pozzello]

how about an IP cam with an SD card onboard? easy enuf to set up for taking jpeg
every 10 minutes (or whatever you want.) simpler than a full off-grid remote access system.

really just needs power, network only when you want to review the footage, and even then
you can simply remove the sd card from the cam to pull stuff off...

 

[JMartin]

... common fallacy made by people with big hammers.

Now that's funny right there.

 

[pozzello]

it'd be phunnier if it were spelled 'phallacy'...

 

[JMartin]

it'd be phunnier if it were spelled 'phallacy'...

That thought crossed my mind.






[It was a short trip]

 

[Q™]

how about an IP cam with an SD card onboard? easy enuf to set up for taking jpeg
every 10 minutes (or whatever you want.) simpler than a full off-grid remote access system.

really just needs power, network only when you want to review the footage, and even then
you can simply remove the sd card from the cam to pull stuff off...

Yes, this idea had previously scampered across my simple mind. In this scenario, it seems to me that with the right size SD card all one has to do is supply power to the camera (and that is a very small power load, easily handled by my friends deep cell solar charged batteries, a power inverter? and a camera power adapter).

What camera would you recommend for this task? These will be all daytime shots. I really like the daytime video recorded by my Chinese market DS-2CD3345-I turret. Is there a similar Hikvision unit which also has an SD card feature?

Thanks pozzello...any more ideas?