“Cheap” should mean here that you don’t need to spend money on extra hardware like a remote timer or on extra software like Windoze (which Canon’s EOS Utility depends on). With a GNU/Linux system, just install gphoto2—in Debian, take version 2.4.5 from ‘squeeze’. After attaching your e.g. Canon EOS camera via USB, you can issue the command
$ gphoto2 --auto-detect --force-overwrite --capture-image-and-download --frames 360 --interval 10
to automatically shoot and download images for a time lapse, in this example every 10 seconds for one hour. You should keep all exposure values constant and switch to a lower resolution in advance. You can render an HD video e.g. with
$ mencoder mf://*jpg -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:mbd=1:vbitrate=7200 -mf fps=25 -o timelapse.avi
If you make it bad, it might look boring like my very first try:
If you make it good, it should look like this.
My hope is that I can use gphoto2 with an Android smartphone.