EN/Ingress Timelapse

Ingress TimeLapse Status: stable
Beschreibung	screenshots over time
Autor:	schinken
PayPal

Description

To see the progress of ingress in bamberg we wanted to create a timelapse over a big period of time. To do so, we use a headless firefox which takes screenshots running an "virtual" x server.

Here are two examples:

• Ingress Bamberg - 2013-05-06 16:56:44 to 2013-05-13 09:09:14
• Ingress Erlangen - 2013-05-07 16:09:21 to 2013-05-13 08:56:28

firefox setup

create profile

First you have to setup a new profile for firefox. You can easily do this by just typing

   firefox -P

into a terminal window. Firefox will now prompt you to create a new profile.

• Click the Create Profile-Button
• Press Next to proceed on the Create Profile Wizard
• Enter your profile name - preferrable without spaces. e.g. use "ingress_cityname"
• Finish.

Firefox has now created a new user directory inside your home.

~/.mozilla/firefox/$randomnum.ingress_yourcity

Remember: If you want to take screenshots on a virtual machine/root-server you have to copy this profile to this machine using e.g. scp

Start firefox with that profile by clicking on "Start Firefox" or run it from console with:

firefox -P ingress_cityname

login to google account

To watch the intel map you need to login into your google account.

• Navigate to http://ingress.com/intel
• Login to your google account
• Accept ingress to access your google account

choose your viewport

On the ingress intel map, just zoom to your location you want to screenshot, and copy the link by using the "link" symbol on the upper right corner. This link contains lat/lon coordinates and the zoom level of your current view.

taking screenshots

dependencies

First you need to have these tools installed:

• firefox
• Xvfb
• avconv

You can install these scripts with the package manager of your linux distribution of your choice

start script

Just create a clone of the ingress-screenshot repository somewhere:

git clone https://github.com/schinken/ingress-screenshot

and configure the run.sh-script with your favorite text editor (vim, emacs, etc..). The parameter names should be self-explanatory.

Simply run the bash script with:

./run.sh

After a couple of minutes/seconds your first screenshot should appear in your current directory

creating a video

To create a video theres also a simple bash script in the git repository. Just run

./make_video.sh 

this will do the dirty job for you