The build.
An iterative weekend project that turned into a multi-day rabbit hole. The hardware was the easy part.
Pi 3B+ + Arducam HQ + adjustable varifocal.
A spare Raspberry Pi from the parts bin, a new Arducam HQ camera board with an IMX477 sensor, and a 2.8–12 mm CS-mount varifocal lens. The Pi does all the work; the camera shoots at full 4056×3040 resolution.
Manual zoom, manual focus, manual aperture.
Three rings: zoom (2.8–12 mm), focus, and aperture (f/1.6). Once dialed in, lock the set screws and walk away. The lens design rejects the convenience of autofocus — which is exactly what a multi-year time-lapse wants.
Second-story stucco wall, under the eave.
Solid stucco between the two upstairs windows, sightline straight out at the hillside. The deep eave overhang above will handle 95% of the weather without needing aggressive sealing. LA gets roughly 36 days of rain a year; the rest is dry.
The first print was wrong, mostly.
Designed for an under-eave shelf mount. Then we pivoted to a flat wall mount and the geometry stopped making sense. Cable cutout too small, Pi standoffs in the wrong column, lens hood didn't account for the wide-angle FOV, the lid notch missing for the wall tab. Useful only as a fit-test.
v2 found the conflicts. v3 fixed them.
Pi and camera mounted on the same back wall to share rigidity with the house wall behind. But the Pi's HDMI/power ports landed under the camera body, the camera's CSI ribbon connector crashed into the camera-tilt wedge. v3 offsets the Pi 2 cm to the side, removes the internal wedge entirely, replaces full-height lid-screw posts with compact corner brackets, adds a notched 1 mm test plate so future tweaks can verify alignment in five minutes of print time.
Indoor pilot, pointed out a second-story window.
Indoors first — same camera, same Pi, same schedule, just pointed through glass at the planned hillside view. A 120-frame test at 30-second intervals stitched into a five-second video proves the whole pipeline before any weatherproofing happens.