I’ve always been fascinated by the speed of growing cress. It also seems to suit my kind of growing – sow it, wait a bit, eat it! I’ve sown some cress seeds in an old margarine pot, with cotton wool and a paper towel as a growing substrate. Motion is being used here in timelapse mode – I’d originally set it to every 2 minutes, but the shots in the animated gif are from the hourly shots (compiled into a gif using gimp). The sun has been quite harsh and this is exacerbated by the webcam, but overall it’s rather fun and so easy to do.
Oddly enough, only one side of the container seemed to grow at anything like the usual rate. Maybe it was too cold or perhaps too waterlogged on one side.
Once the frames had been gathered, they were compiled into a video clip using the following mencoder command:
mencoder mf://*.jpg -mf w=800:h=600:fps=25:type=jpg -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:mbd=2:trell -oac copy -o output.avi
The full version (Three days compressed into two minutes) is in the Youtube clip below:
rPi Kitchen 