Timelapse Guide

Research notes, not a shipped tool: a comparison of ways to turn a V380 4G tri-lens Wi-Fi camera (the kind used for cheap remote site monitoring) into an automated time-lapse rig for a house under construction, without staffing someone to record it manually.

The core problem is that a 4G camera sits behind carrier-grade NAT with no public IP, and V380 exposes no cloud API — nothing on the internet can pull frames from it. The guide weighs five workarounds, roughly in order of how much they're worth trying:

• Enabling native RTSP through an SD-card config trick or an ONVIF toggle in the app — fast and free, but reportedly blocked on the newer tri-lens firmware
• A community P2P extractor that reads the camera's raw protocol over LAN and pipes H.264 straight to ffmpeg, no RTSP required
• A firmware patch that forces RTSP on at the chipset level — real brick risk, expert-only, unproven on this camera's encrypted firmware
• Making the camera push snapshots to AWS itself via an SD-card autorun script, skipping the need for a Raspberry Pi on the LAN entirely — elegant if it works, but experimental
• Swapping in a cheap ONVIF-native camera (Tapo/Imou) instead of fighting the V380, which is the most reliable option overall

Whichever approach yields frames, the same second half of the pipeline applies: a Raspberry Pi captures on a schedule, an AWS IoT device shadow lets the capture interval be retuned remotely without touching the Pi, and a nightly job compiles the frames into a video and syncs it to cloud storage.

• Written to inform TechHouse and Truss rather than as a standalone product
• Five approaches evaluated, each with a real tradeoff between reliability, cost, and setup effort
• No production pipeline built from this yet — it stayed at the research stage

Kept here mostly as a decision record, in case the construction-monitoring problem comes back around.