You can get all kinds of great wildlife footage if you trek out into the woods with a camera, but it can be tough to stay awake all night. However, this is a task you can readily automate, as [Luke] did with his DIY trail camera.
A Raspberry Pi Zero 2W serves as the heart of the build. It’s compact and runs on very little power, but also provides a good amount more processing power than the original Raspberry Pi Zero. It’s kitted out with the Raspberry Pi AI Camera, which uses the Sony IMX500 Intelligent Vision Sensor — providing a great platform for neural networks doing image classification and similar machine learning tasks. A Witty Pi power management module is used both for its real time clock and to schedule start-ups and shutdowns to best manage the power on offer from the batteries. All these components are wrapped up in a 3D printed housing to keep the Pi safe out in the wild.
We’ve seen some neat projects in this vein before.
I get the learning aspect of this project, but using camera for motion detection of living things is still a fail. Store-bought cameras use a PIR sensor, which is very low power. Image capture is done by some ASIC which is also far more efficient than Python + OpenCV.
Finally, I hope you only mount that thing in your own garden. Most trail cams are housed in an enclosure with either mimetic or RealTree camouflage. If I saw something white in a public forest I’d take it down immediately. If it’s not secured with something at least mildly-annoying like security torx I’d open it and steal the Pi for my own project. If it was made tamper resistant, I’d look for a rock, smash it and take the Pi if it’s not damaged.
Well, thats rather negative, and threatening being violent to someone’s camera isn’t clever. The video shows it is in what looks like a garden, and thats where, I at least, would put this. You are right, wildlife cameras in the wild are a different beast, and having helped set some up for a wildlife charity keeping them out of sight and out of reach is pretty key.
In my experience of tinkering with a camera in the garden PIR doesn’t work too well for small rodents, birds, hedgehogs, and even small deer etc, so using local motion detection seems like a good idea. I’ve used server side motion detection in the past, but this looks pretty cool.
Dang this is one of the most pessimistic depressive replies I have ever read on here. Threatening vandalism over a simple how-to on an RPi trail cam. Triggered much?
Usually when I see trailcams, they’re clearly there to gather data for hunters. I went through a brief hunting phase when I was 13. But then I got into electronics and lost interest in that sort of thing. If I saw a Raspberry Pi-based trailcam in nature, I would assume the person who set it up had followed a similar trajectory to mine, though I might well be wrong.
Hi Tim,
Yes, you should never set up a camera like this where you don’t have prior authorization. Also this device does not use simple pixel based motion detection, it uses a YOLO based object detection model to ID and record specific target species. I talk about the benefits of this approach in many of my other videos.
Tim, are you OK?
Mister, chill
I am with Tim. People are destructive. Nice build but you can’t put that device out in an area where you are unable to control the traffic.
Missed a real opportunity to house it in a hollowed out rock or something similarly camo.