I’d like to build a motion-triggered IR camera, to photograph animals in the yard at night. Only still images, not video. Probably storing the images on the micro-SD shield.
Is this a reasonable task for the Arduino Uno?
If the camera would be too much, or too slow, I suppose I could hack a digital point and shoot so that the Arduino could trigger its shutter. How would I do that electrically? A relay in place of the shutter button? Or could I just connect a pin in place of the pin and set it high (or low) when I want to take a picture?
Yeah if I was gonna do it, that’d be my quick and dirty method too. Use a servo to push a button when the trigger is tripped.
There are a couple of CMOS cameras available on the website even an IR model. You could use one of those to make the assmebly a little more refined. There you could use the trigger to electrically cause the camera to take a picture. Then store it on the SD card. The mircro controller doesn’t really ‘see’ the image, it just passes the data through.
The final way, most intensive way, is to do image processing. This is beefy code. You’d take pictures at various time and then compare the images for differences, at the pixel level. You have to allow for differences like wind and lighting otherwise you have a lot of images that are the same but electrically speaking different. That is a substantial operation.