Sunrises and sunsets hardly ever disappoint. Still, it’s difficult to justify waking up early enough to catch one, or to stop what you’re doing in the evening just to watch the dying light. If there’s one good thing about CCTV cameras, it’s that some of them are positioned to catch a lovely view of one of the two, and a great many of them aren’t locked down at all.
[Dries Depoorter] found a way to use some of the many unsecured CCTV cameras around the world for a beautiful reason: to constantly show the sun rising and setting. Here’s how it works: a pair of Raspberry Pi 3B + boards pull the video feeds and display the sunrise/sunset location and the local time on VFD displays using an Arduino Nano Every. There isn’t a whole lot of detail here, but you can probably get the gist from the high-quality pictures.
If you wanted to recreate this for yourself, we might know where you can find some nice CCTV camera candidates. Just look through this dystopian peephole.
Thanks for the tip, [Luke]!
“or to stop what you’re doing in the evening just to watch the dying light”
Well, that’s what I LOVED about living in the Caribbean. Sunset coincides with the end of the workday. Close shop and go home and watch the sunset from the veranda, or drive down to the bay for drinks on the waterfront or beach. Watch the sun set and try to see the green flash.
I love this project, but the idea of never having time to watch the sunset is like, the perfect description of what’s wrong with tech culture.
You’re not wrong. But it’s still a nice option for those of us unfortunate to not be able to do much about the root problem.
I’ve seutp a quick camera outside + LCD inside, just to get a “window” view in my office, and had actual honest responses of “how dare you try to enjoy the little things in life while you prioritize putting food on the table”, which IMHO is a far worse problem in tech culture than this one :/
A cool project but it would be sad substitute for not ever going out to see it with your own eyes. In my experience it’s hard to do justice to the amazing array of colours, tones and textures of a sun rise/set in a photo or video.
Love this project!
But from the pictures shown I think this project leverages cameras intentionally setup to stream beautiful views to the world, i.e. tourist office panocam instead of random unsecured CCTV as implied by the HAD writeup.
PS: For spectacular sunrise to sunset coverage check out the Seattle Space Needle panocam, e.g. sunrise on Dec 11 2017.