Holy Compost Cam Batman!

Approximately 500 images taken over 5 days, roughly once every 15 minutes. A 6.4" x 4.2" view panning down 11 inches of compost located in my backyard.

It surprises me how insanely active this is. My wife started the compost a few years ago and I'm not sure when we last emptied/sifted things. Towards the bottom half the soil/compost is shifted away from the scanner which puts it out of focus, but there's still tons of activity.

I'm capturing a full 8.5 x 11.5" area at 300 DPI and this video is panning vertically across a small portion of it. We've recently put in a bunch of cilantro, strawberry, carrot, and bits and pieces of leaks along with pieces of brown paper bag and potato skins. To be able to see all of this turn to soil would be fascinating!

Compost, Hypha Growth and Instructables

Almost done with the guide/instructable. I need to run through the whole thing one more time to see if all of it adds up properly. In the mean time I've buried two more scanners. The first one a few weeks ago was buried with a flower (pictured in prior post), the Canon LiDE 200 seized up after ~7,000 scans.

The second scanner (another LiDE 200) was buried in our compost bin a couple days ago, and today I started seeing hypha growth along the head of a strawberry that arrived yesterday. In about 8 hours the hypha grew ~6mm. Impressive! I wonder how much further it will grow.

I know very little about fungus, but I remember reading that some forms of fungus form hypha strands capable of ensnaring nematodes. Totally wicked, and would be amazing to capture. Though I'm not sure scanning at 600 or 1200 dpi would suffice. Some details on this here: http://botany-lab.blogspot.com/2015/03/arthrobotrys-carnivorous-fungus.html

Mmmmmmmmm.

Flowers!

Polishing up an instructable on assembling a SoilCam means burying another scanner! In the process I realize I've had a 4 Port Plugable USB hub running for over a year outside, through a Michigan winter. Neat : )

This burial is in a tub that a year ago we used to grow potatoes. While still located outside, having it in a tub makes it easier to have inside which resolves having to worry about how you're going to get power outside. Though if portability is required, a five gallon bucket would be a better option (soil is heavy!) and would still fit the scanner.

Millipede Mating

I think this brings things full circle. Two weeks ago there was a barrage of baby pill bugs, last week we saw death occur as a hungry beetle larvae happened upon a slug, and this week we have millipede mating!

What we can see occurs over a period of 6 hours, and at some point it looks like three millipedes are involved. It's difficult to tell if they are the same millipedes participating throughout the entirety.

I had originally incorrectly titled this post "Centipede Mating". You can see between 16:02:01 and 16:57:02 that each body segment has two pairs of legs. If these were Centipedes you would only see one pair per segment. Assuming these are mating Millipedes we might get to see a slew of babies in a few weeks! Apparently they start off with only three pairs of legs and only after a few molting sessions do they appear as we're used to seeing them.

Amazing piece of info: Millipedes are part of the Myriapod family (many feet), and were the first oxygen breathing animal to walk on land! And last, these creatures are a significant contributor to decomposition, that crazy process that results in this wonderful pile of material we call soil that keeps you and I fed. Next time you're eating anything or simply going somewhere on a walk, thank the Millipedes.

 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumodesmus
 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myriapoda
 - http://www.biokids.umich.edu/critters/Myriapoda/

Image stabilization issues
Some of the videos I compile tend to shake left and right, a result of the scanner occasionally starting at a slightly different position. It always scans the same distance and looking at one image next to another it's difficult to see any difference. Play them back in a video and it becomes very apparent that the images don't line up.

I've used FFMPEG's deshake option to smooth out this jitter, but it's difficult to remove all of it. Going through each image one at a time is a bit too time consuming, so we need to either resolve the initial problem that causes it, or figure out a more accurate work around.

A few thoughts on resolving / working around this:

1. Figure out how the scanner returns home.
 - At 600 DPI even a millimeter off will result in a 20pixel shift. When viewing the whole 8.5x11" area it's not very obvious, when zooming into a smaller area it is. The intended use of these scanners from the manufacturer likely did not include building timelapse videos : )

2. Can we compare the first twenty rows of pixels from left to right of sequential images?
 - Once we find a certain percentage match, trim all rows to the left off.

3. Apply a ~5mm solid white border to the glass scanning plate
 - Use imagemagick to locate the border and crop within the boundary.

Death of a Slug

A week ago a dying worm slowly crawled into a small pocket of space. I was interested at the possibility of seeing what the decomposition process would look like. A few days in and this happens:

I didn't expect to see something so violent! The timelapse videos shows in 10 seconds what in reality took nearly 12 hours. Maybe the speed at which it plays back is what makes it feel so violent? 

It would be great to develop a system that allows for real time viewing, but that will have to wait.

Not sure what type of slug was eaten, the predator in this case appears to be some sort of Beetle Larvae? You can also make out the worm in the first few seconds of video, the view of which is quickly obscured as the Beetle Larvae makes its way in.

Young Pillbugs

A few days ago a couple small explosions of tiny white bugs appeared. Zooming in shows what appear to be hundreds of tiny Pillbugs (Armadillidium vulgare, roly-polies : )! Action begins approximately 9 seconds in.

According to this article these young crustaceans have already spent 10 to 14 weeks riding around in the pouch of a female Pillbug. I wonder if we could look back at previous video and identify any of them?

The area represented in the video is approximately ~8.1cm x 4.5cm (3.2" x 1.8"). This puts the young Pillbugs at ~1.5mm (1/16") in length.

Most of the Pillbugs quickly disperse beyond the viewable area within a few seconds. A few slow down and some can be seen feeding, or being fed on.

So much happening in such little space, so much more happening that's barely visible, and I can only begin to imagine how much is going on that isn't visible at all at this level.

Youtube Playlists, Current Image, Zoomed Views

Weekly videos are now being posted to this playlist on youtube.

Talking with George Albercook and Greg Austic got me wondering (in very rough) terms how the natively captured scanned images compare with a camera.

Scan DPI: 600
Physical Area: ~11.7x8.5"
Pixels:7015x5076

Equivalent to a 35 megapixel camera. Pew pew megapixels! Unfortunately, the videos being posted are processed down to ~1920x1080.

It would be interesting to see the timelapse at 4k on an appropriate monitor, but it's more interesting to start looking closer.  Since we're capturing the images at a higher res than being displayed, we can crop out a 1920x1080 section of the native res image and turn that into a video. Here's what that looks like over the course of a week:

The video above is of a ~3.2" x 1.8" splice of the earth. One week = 604800 seconds. This plays back in ~66 seconds. Life at ~9163x!

The scanner being used can capture images at 2400 DPI, and scanners that can capture at 9600 DPI aren't terribly expensive (though they do get bulkier). Capturing a full image at that res is probably too much for the Raspberry Pi to handle, and the storage space would be excrutiating. 

But capturing even a square inch of space at that DPI would be fascinating, and I think doable : ) 

For now, I wonder what square inch would be most interesting to capture at 2400DPI?

Also, latest images are being posted at the "Latest Image" tab above. Approximately ~10 minute delay.