Pi based Camera trap/Trail camera/Wildlife camera by sprue

Last crawled date: 3 years ago

I have had several commercial wildlife camera traps. The biggest problem I have with them all is the "Trigger Time". If you have a fast moving animal (say a mouse running from cover to cover), most of the commercial offerings miss it completely.
A Raspberry Pi, running "motion" software traps all images and only records if there are a certain number of pixels different from one frame to the next. So no action is lost.
On a Raspberry Pi B+ an ordinary USB camera appears to record at about 5 fps. The onboard MMAL based camera will record at about 15fps. In addition, if you use the NoIR camera, you can use an IR floodlamp to illuminate the scene at night.
This set of parts builds up to be a working camera trap.
The floodlamp I use came from eBay, a 48 LED thing operating off 12V. It contains its' own LDR so it can switch off during daylight. The photo here shows the floodlamp as purchased, you need to take it apart and just have the ring of LEDs.
The whole camera can be powered via PoE or via the DC plug. The system contains two separate DC-DC converters to power the floodlamp and Pi, so it does not matter what power supply you use. I'm using an old PSU from a Toshiba laptop (19v over PoE). Again, the DC-DC (LM2596 based) converters are off eBay and can be bought for about $1 each.
WATERPROOFING NOTE.
I am not entirely convinced the box is waterproof. It may be rain or it may be just condensation. There is definitely water in the box after a month. Not a lot. But it is there. I have now painted the box in liquid latex and will report back.