ZS6BNE's Blog

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"My Project" - Obstacles along the way

Posted: 01 Jun 2020 11:41 PM PDT
https://zs6bne.wordpress.com/2020/06...along-the-way/



The whole idea using an infrared movement detector to trigger a smartphone
camera is a good one.




As mentioned in my previous Blog, I intended using my old cracked screen
Nokia 3 smartphone as the camera. I had fitted it nicely into the box with
an opening for the lens. When it came to testing, the phone simply did not
react to the 450 ohm resistor across the mic connector like my Samsung did,
no matter what App I used and I tried a few. This was quite disappointing!




I refined the timing in the Arduino NANO program and added switching for
the infrared flash. It worked reasonably well and then I discovered
something about cell phone cameras. They dont see infrared light and so
need a white flash for night time photography. Those bright flashes will
certainly frighten the animals I so want to photograph!




I used my CCTV monitoring cameras to prove the infrared flash was working.
You see the flash very clearly on replay. The eye however only sees a dim
glow on the LEDs. This definitely the right flash for the task!








I have a Rasberry Pi and also a Pi camera which Ive used in the past. I got
that going again using MotionEyeOS, a perfect solution for movement
detection, snapshots and videos although the camera is no where near the
quality of a smartphone camera. BUT, as soon as I removed the Pi from the
network MotionEyeOS became non operational. Now thats useless if I want to
take it to the field!




Then I tried using Python to talk to the camera and I was in control of the
software which I like. BUT, the Pi is so slow, the animals would pass by
long before any capturing could be done. This added to my frustrations ..




Sure, buying a dedicated trail camera is cheap enough and brings a lot of
fun and excitement but I still want to get this dinosaur walking (In
comparison to a dedicated, compact trail camera!)








This is the latest Arduino program. The next version will make use of
interrupts, a more intelligent way of reaction to the infrared motion
detector signal. Watch this space ..



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