Time lapse camera app for hands-off watching my house? (Assessing roof for solar panels)

I want to put solar panels on my roof, but there are some big trees (in my neighbor’s yard) that shade my roof at various points throughout the day. I’m really not sure how much sun I get consistently.

I was thinking I could do something like take time-lapse pictures of my roof, perhaps once per hour, and collect that for both summer and winter.

I have a couple of old Android phones available. I was wondering if I could put one one a tree, facing my roof, and have it collect pictures periodically, unattended. I can get power to it, and it’s within range of my WIFI.

Anyone done anything like this? Any recommendations on Android app or approach? (Or other ideas on assessing my roof solar coverage?) Thanks

dilligasatall,

I’ve used “Lapse it Pro” on one of my older phones and it worked well, but I can’t say anything about the free version tho, and there’s probably something better by now considering that app is pretty old already.

Another option if you can’t find a good time lapse app is to set up the phone as an ip webcam and use something like Ispy (Camera security app) on a wifi connected pc to save a snapshot every hour (or whatever you set it to do, it has timelapse functionality, as well as motion sense.)

grunthos503,

I’ll check those out; thanks!

ladfrombrad,
@ladfrombrad@lemdro.id avatar

I’d also check out some of the dedicated Sun Locator apps

play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andymst…

Wasn’t this one I used prior trying to figure out if some solar powered LED lights I’d bought for someone’s back yard would work, but it did help me figure out that they’d have never have got enough sunlight to power them and instead gave them away to someone else with a much more lit place :/

grunthos503,

Cool, thanks!

grunthos503,

Just to follow up, I ended up using the “IP Webcam” android app, and it’s working great. I wrote a little script of my own (Bash and Curl) to grab a pic from it every half hour.

dilligasatall,

Cool, glad it worked out for you!

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