The Naturebytes 3D Printed Stealth Nature Cam -- Kickstarter

[Brian_Krassenstein]

Three Londoners, Stephen Mowat, Alasdair Davies and Jon Fidler, are the team behind the Naturebytes project, and at the center of their plan is a Raspberry Pi-powered wildlife camera they hope will help inspire a community of digital makers monitor wildlife activity. Mowat, a Conservation Ecologist and member of the Zoological Society of London, says his focus is on using new technologies to understand the ecology and behavior of key species. Naturebytes is an open, hackable device to help wildlife fans, photography enthusiasts,digital makers, engineers, teachers and educators develop skills in computing, coding, 3D design and printing. The Naturebytes Wildlife Cam Kit is capable of capturing stealthy, high definition images of even the most elusive wildlife and uses a weatherproof, 3D printed case to protect the electronics within--and it's running a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter now. You can read the whole story here: http://3dprint.com/77195/naturebytes-kickstarter/


Below is a photo of a Naturebytes camera focused on a homemade bird feeder:

[Wolfie]

Stealth? Seriously? A bright boxy lime green enclosure is stealth?



Gentlemen. I give you stealth.


Now as far as the project goes, way over priced and marginally designed and thought out. Its designed for a Raspberry Pi A+. Thats one of the oldest RPi boards and are considered obsolete in most circles. They only have 256mb of ram, fairly slow CPU, a single usb port and no ethernet. Yes, they are cheap, $20 or less. Yes, they are the lowest power consumer of the Pi family. But for $5 more you could get a RPi B+ with double the ram, 4 usb ports and an ethernet port and it only draws slightly more power. But it wouldn't fit their enclosure if I read things right.


At $135 their base kit (sans a RPi) is way over priced. With a RPi A+ we are talking $155 (plus shipping). For that you could get 2 or 3 TRUE STEALTH trail cameras. And most of them have IR emitting LEDs, and most will record sound, neither of which their RPi system has. The RPi's camera module does not record sound and they have no IR lighting for night shots. The only thing they bring to the table is the hackability. Not sure I need to hack a trail camera, especially when it costs 2x to 3x what an off the shelf trail camera that does as much or more than their device does.

I have three RPi 2 B+ (1gb ram, 900mhz quad core ARM proc) as well as an Arduino Uno. One RPi runs the camera on my Taz5. Another is a security camera (IR with IR Lum) that has motion detection and snaps shots and video and uploads to my Dropbox as well as live streaming via WiFi, the third is an entertainment box for watching movies and playing games (dual boot OSMC/Kodi and Raspian). It will even play Quake 3 and other older games like Descent 1/2 and Doom as well as run LDXE with LibreOffice.