Open Source Camera Trap

For the past few months I have been talking to few of you about building open source conservation tools. In this post, I would like to propose building a basic camera trap for conservation work. If you don’t know what a camera trap is, please read WWF’s fantastic resource here <LINK_TEXT text=“https://www.wwf.org.uk/project/conserva … amera-trap”>https://www.wwf.org.uk/project/conservationtechnology/camera-trap</LINK_TEXT>



The goal of this project is to use open hardware components to create a very low power consuming device that could last for 6 months or more on standard AA batteries. The device goes into deep sleep power saving mode and wake up to take pictures or video within couple seconds (or less) of motion sensor trigger event.





MCU - Low-power, low-speed MCU BeagleBone Green?

– onboard eMMC

– high speed CSI and enough memory to handle high resolution image and video

– good disk IO with buffer for fast writes to sdcard

– onboard High Precision RTC

– onboard microSD card slot



PIR Sensor

– industrial grade motion sensor

– reliable in all weather conditions

– good wide field of view



Camera

– CSI 2.0 MIPI compliant

– Day/Night IRCut Camera

– Optional IR light source or Red/White flash

– Microphone to record audio



HCI

Backlight LCD Display with buttons for menu selection.



GPIO

GPIO pins or two grove connectors. This could be used for adding additional heat, humidity sensors, a speaker

or a remote PIR motion sensor



Power

AA battery holder



Case

– Clear glass opening for camera and motion sensor

– holes to pass wire to tie camera trap to a tree

–water-proof, Weather proof case

–space to put desiccants material to absorb moisture

Wow, what a meaningful and huge project! It is more like a project or application than a product. Beaglebone Green is a fine board however does not have MIPI CSI, maybe we can find an existing low power develpoment and inlude the PIR, Camer, LCD, Case into one kit to make such application.

Thank you for kind words. Am really open for any suggestions as we really need a solution in the field right now.

What would be best way to create such a kit? Where do I start: what sort of low power board do you suggest that is fast enough to take pictures and save time to sdcard. Thanks!