Self-updating Pothos Timelapse
A daily-updated timelapse of my pothos plant.
While I’ve cared for (and killed) a variety of different houseplants over the years, pothos plants are probably my favorite. They are incredibly hardy, easy to propogate from clippings, and they grow quickly. I’ve always been curious to learn a bit more about how these plants maneuver as they grow, so I decided to set up an automated system to monitor mine.
Combining an ESP8266 equipped with a camera, some Philips Hue smart lights, and a Raspberry Pi, this system takes a picture of the plant every hour and prepares a rolling timelapse of the past week every day at midnight. A bit of code handles exposure by balancing out the smart lights in my living room and turning on an overhead light before taking the picture. Another bit of code does some color balancing, yielding a better looking photo. Each day it uploads the latest timelapse to pothos.evanking.io. The timelapse above is the latest, updated automatically. UPDATE: I took this down when I moved in 2023 and haven’t had a chance to put it up again. It was a fun project though, so I’m keeping it here for archival purposes.
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View the code on GitHub.