Octolapse: [Feature Request] Timestamp embedded into timelapse video.

[Simrien]

Firstly, Octolapse is "the" top notch time lapse feature. Kudos...

Next, I saw lots of people placing analogue clocks inside their enclosures to give a sense of time passing during the capture.
I did this myself with a kitchen timer and a digital clock.

Then figured, this is high end tech... why not have the current date/time stamped on the frames (circa 1995 style)?
That would be very cool with either an analogue (or digital) clock spinning in one of the corners of the video.
I think this would be very cool and negate the need to find somewhere to place a physical clock inside the enclosure.
Presumably the timestamp can be read from the frame capture image file...

Has anyone suggested this before?

[FormerLurker]

You are in luck, as this feature already exists :)

Check the rendering profile and look for the text overlay section. There are lots of options there, like font and size selection, alignment, position, and myriad replacement tokens. You can even preview the overlay before you print. Let me know how it goes!

[Simrien]

I LOVE YOU... going to look now :0)

[Simrien]

It worked perfectly, recommend 72 point text for a 1920x1080 timelapse, thank you :0)

[FormerLurker]

Woot! Fyi, if you are using a raspberry pi, install fontconfig for access to all of the installed fonts. Or you can add your own and have access to whatever you can find online.

[Simrien]

You're a star, is fontconfig an octopi add-in? I was thinking it needed an 80s style digital clock font :0)
Next question, how do I give you a donation?

[FormerLurker]

FontConfig can be installed via apt-get like so: sudo apt-get install fontconfig. It is not limited to OctoPi, and will run on any (most??) Linux distro. You can install your own fonts, reboot (I think this is necessary) and they will show up in the Octolapse font list.

Regarding donations, thank you very much! You will find links on the Octolapse tab to Patreon, Paypal and Github (I'm on Github Sponsors too):

Donations are not required, but are much appreciated!

[Simrien]

Sent some spons via paypal, thank you, well deserved, top product and top support.

It looks like fontconfig is already installed and up to date so all I need to do is get some TTF files over to the pi.

xx@xxxxx:~ $ sudo apt install fontconfig
[sudo] password for xx:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
fontconfig is already the newest version (2.13.1-2).
fontconfig set to manually installed.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 16 not upgraded.

[FormerLurker]

Thanks!

Also, fontconfig must now be installed by default, which is awesome. It used to not be. Let me know if you find a good digital font!

[Simrien]

You're most welcome.

I got a digital font from https://www.1001fonts.com/digital-fonts.html
Top one, digital-7, downloaded and unzipped that to my local drive.

Installed the FileZilla 64 bit windows client.
Be warned, McAfee detects spyware in the official download.
(I've used FileZilla for years and is my preferred FTP client).
I kicked off the install and let McAfee deal with the potential spyware.

Connected to the IP address of the Raspberry PI on port 22 via FileZilla using my Pi username and password.
The official path to install fonts is /usr/share/fonts

However, I kept getting an access denied so did some more research.
The information I found advised to create a .fonts folder in the home directory /home/pi/.fonts
So I created the .fonts folder and uploaded the digital-7 folder to that location.
Then using PuTTY ran the following command... fc-cache -v -f
This picked up the 4 new TTF fonts which were immediately available for use in Octolapse.... ta-da... :0)

[FormerLurker]

Hey, I added more formatting options to the 'time elapsed' token. Watch for the next release.

Closing this now, thanks for the submission!