Here’s a timelapse of the tide that took some planning
I’ve had a raspberry pi for a while now to do random timelapses, and there was one I thought of doing for the tides in the bay. But for this timelapse, I wanted to have the tide go over the camera!
So I needed to find a suitable clear, waterproof box to hold the battery and the raspberry pi. Easy right? Well no, many a box was either too large or too small, or only claimed it was water resistant for a few minutes (why would you even say that?). But eventually I found a box that could work for the project.
Once the box was located, I made some shelves to fit within the box. The plan was to have the box upside down, so if it leaked, most of the air would still stay inside – air higher than the lid seal can’t leak out, so have the seal rather low (was my thinking). These shelves could keep anything inside the box dry should that happen. I made them one Sunday afternoon out of scrap wood and some old wooden spools from my great grandmother (everyone has barrels full of wooden spools from their great-great grandparents…, right??).
I also got some steel plates (people also have these things just laying around their house as well, yes?) to use as weight that went inside the box. This wasn’t enough weight to keep this contraption submerged, so two 8lb dumbbells were laid on top.
After it ran for several hours, I retrieved the box from under the water after sunset. It was completely dry inside, so it worked! And here’s the resulting time lapse that it caught:
Turns out, it’s not that exciting; the water is too murky to really see anything! I might have to try this in some clearer water in the future. But I like how you can see all the snails “zip” around during low tide.
Stats:
Number of Images: 3,289 Combined size: 5.79 GB
First Image: Oct 04, 2021 - 09:59:18 AM
Number of Images: 3,286 Combined size: 5.38 GB
First Image: Oct 04, 2021 - 09:59:48 AM
(3 hours, 2 minutes, 6 seconds AFTER Sunrise)
Last Image: Oct 04, 2021 - 07:07:25 PM
(30 minutes, 48 seconds AFTER Sunset)
Average time between images: 10.002 seconds
(min: 9.0s, max: 11.0s, difference: 2.0s)
Sunrise and Sunset for the first and last images' date:
Oct 04, 2021 - 06:57:42 AM
Oct 04, 2021 - 06:36:37 PM
Time lapse covers 9 hours, 7 minutes, 37 seconds.
Time lapse is 54.750 seconds long.
Time compression is 600 X
That is, 1 second of video = 10 minutes of real time
Orthallelous 
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