Step 1: Connect the Camera
So to connect the camera is quite simple and there is a lot of help online. The official help video is here:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/help/camera-module-set…
but I found this to be more helpful
http://thepihut.com/blogs/raspberry-pi-tutorials/1…
once installed and you have enabled the camera try it out with the raspistill -o image.jpg command. Hopefully it takes a picture but if not you need to go back and check from these links until it works properly.
Step 2: Access
next you need to setup remove access from your laptop or PC.
if you have a wireless adapter like this one:
http://thepihut.com/products/usb-wifi-adapter-for-…
then now is the time to install and set it up. There is help on that here:
http://thepihut.com/blogs/raspberry-pi-tutorials/16018016-how-to-setup-wifi-on-the-raspberry-pi-raspbian
Next we need two free programs: the first allows you to get remote access to a terminal prompt where you can run the script and the second allows access to get the pictures off.
Download and install putty:
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/
and then WinSCP:
http://winscp.net/eng/index.php
you can go for alternatives if you like but these are pretty good
Step 3: Connect the stepper motor
ok so you should have a motor that looks something like the picture.. First put the pulley on make sure the grub screw tightens onto the flat part of the shaft.
First connect the motor to the control board this is the white tipped cable and only goes in one way. Next take the female to female leads to connect the motor control board to your Pi. I have drawn how to do this with a Raspberry Pi B+ based on the following URL:
http://www.raspberrypi-spy.co.uk/2012/07/stepper-m…
once it is connected use WinSCP to upload the following script to your pi as stepper.py
two important lines you can play with once the rig is working is this one:
for x in range(1, 200):
which tells the script how many times to take a picture and move and this one:
for x in range(0, 2000):
which tells the script how long between pictures. 2000 works out to be about 52 seconds
Also if you have a big microSD card you might want to increase the resolution of your individual pics. You can do this by adding the line “camera.resolution = (2592,1944)” immediately before the line that says “camera.capture(nextpicname)” . That is the maximum resolution so it will fill space quick (200 pics is approx 430Mb or possibly more) but you can also try lower resolutions.
For more detail: Raspberry Pi moving timelapse
