Night Watch
A camera built to hang up, made to watch all night.
The Tapo C402 runs on a battery and a solar panel, so it is designed to stop. It sleeps until something moves, and it ends a live connection after ten or fifteen minutes whether you are watching or not. That is the right design for a camera on a pole. It is useless for watching a turtle nest until dawn.
So nothing fights it. A Raspberry Pi on the same WiFi opens a stream, hangs up deliberately at eight minutes — before the camera can — and reconnects a second and a half later. Chained back to back, those short connections cover the night. The Pi saves a frame every fifteen seconds, stops itself if the battery runs low, and stitches the night into a two-minute timelapse by morning. A password-protected page starts and stops it from anywhere.
When a nest was close to hatching, a frame every fifteen seconds was not enough. The code showed the Pi had been receiving full HD video the whole time, and throwing away all but one frame in two hundred and twenty-five. Keeping it cost the camera nothing. It was already being sent.
A few lines later the Pi was writing clips alongside the stills.
Raspberry Pi, Python, one off-the-shelf camera. Built with Claude.