Why?

As someone who works in software, a question I get about this project / side business is “why on earth did you decide to build this”. Firstly, don’t worry, it has nothing to do with AI, the camera doesn’t use AI and it has everything to do with a plant problem.

Since moving back to Austin TX, something I’ve been doing since I was a kid is growing Oak Tree saplings from acorns. Something cool about this is that you get to keep local genetics / adaptations but sort of cheat nature. In the wild, less than 0.01% of acorns actually turn into a viable sapling, less than 5% of those make it one year after a hot Texas summer (even if there’s rain). By acting as a helpful human, you can turn that number into over 80%. So as a result of this hobby, which takes years and lots of arduous work to get right, I ran into the issue of trying to understand which saplings were healthy, which grew faster, slower etc and needed a way to do this remotely.

Lots of sort of “good” web cam type cameras exist to monitor a greenhouse / plant room but I found none of them really let you retain the frames, have decent visual control of the image and for those that have a “timelapse” option it’s usually extremely limited or barely works.

That’s why I embarked on the mission to build something better since it frankly just didn’t exist. Both the hardware and more importantly… the software that’s used to render and visualize timelapse footage.

To be continued…