🌱 Project Lunaria

Project Lunaria is inspired by a plant that blooms quietly, drops its seeds, and returns each year. Like the plant, this open-source project grows, spreads, and thrives through the community.

A time-lapse camera system built for Raspberry Pi to capture the growth of your plants, fully open source, built with TypeScript + Node.js.

A small system that captures the beauty of time, one photo at a time. 🌙🌱

Features

• ⏱️ Time-lapse Photography: Takes a photo on configurable interval using Raspberry Pi camera
• 🗂️ Local Storage: Saves photos locally to /photos folder
• 🌐 Global CLI Tool: Install lunaria-cli globally for remote seed management
• 📥 Remote Photo Download: Download photos from remote Lunaria seeds via API
• 🎬 Timelapse Video Creation: Generate MP4 timelapse videos with FFmpeg integration
• ⏰ Timestamp Overlays: Add date/time stamps to timelapse videos
• 🔧 Interactive Setup: Guided CLI prompts for seed registration and configuration

Installation

🔧 Camera Setup

Ensure rpicam-still is installed:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install libcamera-apps

NodeJs Setup

Install nodejs:

sudo apt-get install -y nodejs

if not yet installed, install also npm:

sudo apt-get install -y npm

🎬 FFmpeg Setup

To create timelapse videos with lunaria-cli timelapse, you need FFmpeg installed on your system:

macOS:

# Install FFmpeg:
brew install ffmpeg

# Verify installation:
ffmpeg -version

Ubuntu/Debian:

sudo apt update && sudo apt install ffmpeg

Windows:

# Using Chocolatey:
choco install ffmpeg

# Or download manually from: https://ffmpeg.org/download.html

Note: FFmpeg is a system dependency and cannot be installed via npm. It must be installed separately on your operating system.

Run The project

Now it is time to clone the repository:

Clone the project:

git clone https://github.com/ulemons/project-lunaria.git
cd project-lunaria

📦 Build and install the project:

npm install
npm run build
npm install -g .

🚀 Development Workflow

For faster development iterations, use these convenient scripts:

# Build and install globally in one command
npm run dev

# Force reinstall (useful when making changes)
npm run update-cli

🛠️ Using Lunaria CLI

Once installed globally, you can use the lunaria-cli command from anywhere on your system.

Once installed you can find available commands using:

# Show help and available commands
lunaria-cli --help

Setting up a new seed

Configure your Lunaria seed interactively:

lunaria-cli register

This will prompt you for:

• Plant name (e.g., "Kitchen Basil")
• Location (e.g., "Kitchen")
• Owner name

The configuration is saved as config.json in your project directory.

Creating timelapse videos

Quality Settings:

• Low: 720p resolution, faster encoding
• Medium: 1080p resolution, balanced quality/speed (recommended)
• High: 1440p resolution, best quality but slower encoding

Autostart with systemd

To run automatically Lunaria on system boot (es. Raspberry Pi, Linux server), follow these steps:

1. Find complete paths of Node.js and project Lunaria

Open terminal and run:

which node
which npm

Write down the paths (es. /usr/bin/node, /usr/local/bin/npm).

Find the project path, for example:

/home/ubuntu/project-lunaria

2. Create new systemd service file

Open the service file:

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/lunaria.service

Paste the following text (edit WorkingDirectory, ExecStart, User e PATH if needed):

[Unit]
Description=Automatic start of project Lunaria
After=network.target

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/npm run start
WorkingDirectory=/home/ubuntu/project-lunaria
Restart=always
User=ubuntu
Environment=PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin
Environment=NODE_ENV=production
StandardOutput=journal
StandardError=journal

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Note: replace ubuntu with your username (retrieved with whoami).

3. Enable and start the service

sudo systemctl daemon-reexec
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable lunaria.service
sudo systemctl start lunaria.service

4. Check that is runnning

Check service state:

sudo systemctl status lunaria.service

Monitor live logs:

journalctl -u lunaria.service -f

🔧 Technical Stack

• Runtime: Node.js with TypeScript (ES2020)
• Core Dependencies:
  • Express 5.1.0 (Web API framework)
  • Cron 4.3.3 (Scheduled photography)
  • UUID 13.0.0 (Unique identifiers)
• Video Processing: FFmpeg (external dependency)

🧪 Compatibility

Device	OS	Status	Note
Raspberry Pi Zero W 1.1		❌	Currently unsupported due to hardware limitations.
Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W		⚠️	Working in progress
Raspberry Pi 4	Linux	✅	Recommended platform

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.
© 2025 Umberto Sgueglia (ulemons). See LICENSE for details.