I'm planning to do the same thing, at the moment I've got a Raspberry Pi, with a wi-fi dongle and a logitech 720p webcam, and using motion. Motion does motion detection using the webcam, and if it sees movement, it will capture images on a configurable speed (like 4 per second, or one every 6 seconds, whatever) and will also turn those frames into a timelapse movie.
[
www.instructables.com]
[
www.raspberrypi.org]