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Time-Lapse Movie of Chicks Hatching

Chicks

This is a time-lapse movie of Buckeye Cross1Buckeye rooster, various hens chicks hatching in the incubator, between March 23 and March 24, 2021

The movie was created using snapshot images taken 1 second apart during the hatching process, by a camera mounted inside the incubator. The camera setup is described below.

Camera Setup

The camera setup consists of :

  • Raspberry Pi 5MP (version 1) camera. The particular model used was the Arducam B0031, which supports interchangeable M12/S-mount, security camera lenses. Any of the available Raspberry Pi camera models (e.g. the 8MP-V2 or the 12MP-HQ cameras) would work, but 5MP was sufficient.
  • an M12 160° “fisheye” lens
  • Arducam CSI to HDMI adaptor boards. These allowed me to more easily mount the camera inside the incubator, and to connect to the Raspberry Pi using an HDMI cable, which is less fragile than a ribbon cable connection. See images below.
  • A Raspberry PI computer, model 3B+. This happened to be one I had available, any model with a CSI connector should work.

The Raspberry Pi is running a minimal web-server, written in Python, which reads the camera on requests for URL “http://IP/snapshot.jpg”

A server program, running on another (Linux) machine:

  • reads snapshot images from IP cameras once per second
  • makes them available to this web site for the various camera pages
  • and saves them to an external drive.
  • Once a day a background process turns the collected images into time-lapse movies.

The movie above was edited, from two of the daily time-lapses, using DaVinci Resolve.

Raspberry PI 3, connected via CSI/HDMI adapter. The ribbon cable is thin enough to slip through the seam between the incubator and the top without disturbing the heat seal
Arducam 5MP camera, with M12 lens (removed from the incubator), There is velcro on the back of the camera plate, and matching velcro glued to the inside of the incubator cover for positioning the camera.