I’m interested in setting up a video camera to see what my tortoise does when I’m not watching. I actually keep a notebook of what I observe, his likes and dislikes, health info and so on mostly in the event that he outlives me. I started from scratch with him and hated knowing nothing about him. Has anyone had success or failure with particular types of cameras? Cameras with longer battery life etc? Thanks in advance!
Cameras
- Thread starter eOrchid
- Start date
Cool idea. Are you thinking of doing time lapse photography? Many DSLR cameras can take thousands of photos on a single change when doing time lapse work. Shooting hours of constant video would quickly drain most camera's batteries, not to mention fill up memory cards.
I use a hunting game camera from Cabelas that looks over RFs pen. It doesn’t take actual pix of my torts, but anybody/thing going into or out of their pen. It’s usually me, my grandson, raccoons, hawks and other birds. It won’t stop anyone from stealing my torts but it will ID them. Batteries are AA rechargeable and last about a month except during bird migratory season. During this time birds are in and out constantly hitting the water dishes.
I hadn’t thought of doing time lapse photography. That might be the key. I’m just trying to get an overall idea of “who” Alexei is when I’m not looking. When I am looking, I’ve seen some pretty remarkable things.
I had kinda wondered about hunting cameras [emoji848].
I think time lapse would be the way to go. You could set up the camera to do a whole day of activity. Some cameras have this capability built in, and at the end of the programmed interval, they create a movie. For example, you might program the camera to take a shot every minute, and stitch that into a video. You create a video each day and you'd get some pretty cool information on what the tortoise does and if it does the same thing every day, etc.
I'm using a Raspberry Pi Zero W to monitor and control the enclosure, and I also have the standard camera module attached. I'm using Motion to stream the video, so I can check on my little guys whenever I wish, and also to save videos and images whenever a motion occurs. I'm also planning to process these images to get the coordinates of the tortoises and create a sort of "heat map", so that I know which part of the enclosure they like the best, how much UVB they really get, etc.
I’m not familiar with this product at all. It’s essentially a “brain “ that has the ability to use attachments in order to broaden it’s capabilities and versatility?
Basically, yes. It's a miniature, cheap, but full-fledged computer, and you can run various Linux distributions and some other operating systems on it. It has some USB ports, HDMI port, a dedicated camera port, several GPIO ports (these can be used for lots of things like digital communication with sensors, controlling relays, and a million other things), WiFi or cable Ethernet port (depending on the exact type).
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