As you can see from the photo on the right of this page, the FieldCam is now live - and has been for a week or so.
The wooden sled is attached to a fence post, down towards the bottom of the field and well away from where any lost walkers will wander!Its not in the ideal postion for the sun, as it gets shady quite early in the day, but I had to make a balance between placing it in a secure, out-of-the-way location and getting a great sunny spot.
I nailed the sled to the fence post, and its also got a couple of cheap bike locks on it, so hopefully it won't be going anywhere!
The system is set to wake up every hour and send me a photo, as long as there is enough life in the batteries. On good sunny days (winter sun, at this time of the year!) I've been getting between four and six photos a day. On the more usual cloudy days, we're down to a couple of photos a day, and there was even one day when no photo was sent at all. Its encouraging that even after this downtime, the system wakes up when it has enough charge and gets on with its job - which I guess means it works!
I have a new processor which will reduce the on-time to only 5 minutes every hour, down from the current 15 minutes, so hopefully when I fit that we should get more photos each day. I'm especially keen to store up enough electricity during the day to see how the night vision works, but may need to wait until sunnier days before we see that happen.
The system is set to email photo's to my gmail account, which in turn forwards it on to Flickr, where I can view the last 200 pictures. The picture on the right is from the Flickr "Photostream" and if you click it (or click here!) you can see the last 200 photos - highlights to date are: sheep, snow, new molehills and a blackbird!
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I would like to do the same thing with a YCam camera and put out on some land we own. Do you have any suggestions if you were building this over again how you would make it better. I would like to build my own. Thanks, weldenjr@gmail.com
ReplyDeleteSo far I've been pretty pleased with the set-up. The battery drains faster than I'd hoped, but I have a new microprocessor which only remains on for 5 minutes, I've yet to fit that, but it should make a big difference (I hope!) without making me splash out on bigger solar panels, etc.
ReplyDeleteI'd like to get the whole kit in a nice secure weather proof box too, making any changes (eg. swapping in the new microprocessor) is going to be a pain with what I have, as I'll have to unscrew bits of wood, etc. - a nice box with a lockable lid would make that easier!
We tend to get one photo on very gloomy days, and four or more on sunny days, and its still winter. Haven't had any night pictures yet, so still not sure I'd go with the YCam Black in hindsight - though one good nighttime picture could change my mind on that!
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