I know there are several people and teams going through the journey of building their own trail cameras – so I decided to make the guide I wish I had when we were still building hardware.
I also really would love to hear from people if there is anything I am missing. Features which I don’t mention which would be great to include? Let those who are on the trail camera development journey hear about what is missing from the existing solutions 😊
You can read the article here: Building the perfect Wildlife Camera (Guide)
The article is long, so here’s the TL;DR:
Feedback we got throughout our camera journey
Deep dive into key components: camera, PIR sensors, Fresnel lenses, IR illumination, etc.
Why we ultimately shifted away from hardware.
What I would have done differently.
I hope someone finds it helpful!
18 February 2025 4:15pm
If you are the least interested in camera traps, you should definately go and check out Hugo's interesting article!
Cheers,
Lars
21 February 2025 4:22pm
Great Article! (and thanks for the ping re: "PIR Sensors" )
I like the idea of a simple magnetic trigger. As an alternative, I've often wondered about an ultra-low-power "wake on Radio" receiver that could be connected wirelessly to a range of different trigger devices.
Also, there is an interesting tradeoff between battery life and trigger speed you didn't cover. Namely, all the commercial trail cameras I know of turn themselves almost completely off between triggers to save power. An ultra low power "boot controller" monitors the PIR sensor, and when triggered, initiates the boot sequence for the main SoC. I've found that the boot process (rather than PIR bandwdith, configuring the image sensor, shutter speed, etc. ) dominates the "trigger time". It is remarkable that this all happens in less than 400 ms for the newer trail cameras. There are some hacks to help this along, for example, locating the time-critical code early in the EEPROM boot image so that the firmware can start executing before all the firmware is loaded (ask me how I discovered this).
For those interested in the inner workings of a typical commercial trail camera, check out my series of articles documenting reverse engineering (and hacking) a few Browning models.
Lars Holst Hansen
Aarhus University