After an initial failed attempt at capturing a picture of the loch from the top of my garden, I've finally got around to trying again.

The last sunset picture

What changed?

I've made a couple of changes to the original camera.

• Take photos of the sunset rather than the sunrise. The camera points directly east... This means trying to catch an image at sunrise, means the camera is pointing directly at the sun. Less than ideal
• Replace the ESP32 with a Raspberry Pi. I can stick much higher quality camera sensors on this thing.

So, a Raspberry Pi pointing straight down the loch taking photos an hour before sunset each night. The camera is part of the Fediverse, and each photo gets published as an ActivityPub note

Huh, how can a camera be part of the Fediverse?

The camera is an ActivityPub Actor. If you have an mastodon account, go to the search bar, and search for @lochearnhead-sunset@agoodmooring.com and you'll find the camera. Then you can:

• Follow the camera and you'll get a picture of the sunset over Loch Earn every day in your feed.

• Reply to those messages and your reply will show up as a comment at the picture's page here (after moderation...)

• Favourite or boost the picture, and that also should be reflected on the picture's page here.

The Camera

The camera is a Raspberry Pi Zero 2w, with a Camera Module 3 plugged into it.

It's connected to a solar panel with a battery, and taped up a pole in the garden.

The image quality is significantly better than those captured with the esp32-cam, but still don't really do the view justice. When I get around to it, I will try a few different camera modules in there to try and improve things a little.

It feels kind of overkill to be running a full linux up there, but it does give me some interesting options to get it doing some other work. I have a number of little microphones lying around the place, so I will get one of those things plugged in at some point soon so I can do some bird-song sampling and analysis using the same Pi.