Idea for multi-point time lapse photography system

It snowed here the other day and the university was closed. In the morning, I checked a video camera that had been taking one frame every minute for the last 12 or so hours out the front window. Later that day, after sundown, I will stop the camera and rewind the tape. The footage will yield about 4 minutes of snowfall footage when played at speed.

And I had this idea. Multi-point site installations of stationary, time-lapse recorders filming the course of the construction phase of a property. The devices are housed in discreet columns resembling a simple granite post, containing these devices: a camera, a computer, a storage card and an i/o interface. The brain of the system is the computer, either an embedded device or a microcontroller. Images are captured at regular intervals (about 1 frame per minute, or 1 minute of frames for every real time hour), and stored to the high-capacity SD Card. Special capturing operations and positioning are handled programatically, running either off a script or image-acquisition software tools.

Breaking out the communication into wireless for streaming, admin and calibration would be great. A serial interface less so, but would be required for basic functionality of streaming data and i/o config of the hardware.