Planning On Doing

Time Lapse

So I will be driving across the country here in a few weeks from Seattle to New York. I'm thinking I would like to do a time lapse of the drive. Now this would be a huge undertaking not only with the amount of data and battery consumption but also figuring out how to program the time interval. I could bring my lap top to control the camera but then I would have to deal with figuring out how to charge that as well.

I have been looking online for some solutions and I did find two timer controlers made for canon cameras one was a cheap model which was the Satechi TR-C which has the limitation of only being able to shoot a maximum of 399 pictures in one setting. This would mean that I would have to reset it about every hour or so. The second option is a canon brand controller called Canon TC80N3 This seems to be exactly what I would need but it costs $200. So I then decided to look deeper in the interwebular tangle of tubes for another solution.

That's when I found this site. It goes into detail on how to use almost any Texas Instrument grafting calculator to control the time interval of your time lapse shoot with virtually endless intervals and shots. So I just bought an old Ti-83 for $20 and i should be able to connect the mini jack of the calculator up to my camera. If this works it would save so much time, money and hassle. Now all I have to worry about is all the data. I would like to have an interval of 10 seconds giving me 360 pictures every hour. I think if I drop the quality down to small I should be able to get a days worth of pictures on a 16gig card.

As for power I think I may buy a power inverter to plug into the cigarette lighter and then just plug my camera into that. So I think I have all that figured out. So now I just need to make some sort of mount and also I think I will build some sort of insulated enclosure to lessen the noise of that continuous click. Even though the truck will be pretty loud and we will probably be listening to music it might get annoying just having it open.

Will I actually put all this together and do it? Maybe. It's sort of a once in a life time thing. It is a pretty big undertaking though.