It may not surprise you to know that I've built my own cameras using the cheapest Raspberry Pi board (except it's the one with WiFi).
The CEX shop have refurb Pi Zero W boards for £18 tinyurl.com/2ee3452d and refurb camera boards for £6 tinyurl.com/ynhm8ar2 (Blimey, they've both more than doubling in price since I got mine new!!)
A case from eBay for a few quid, and SD card and a couple of cables, install motioneyos ( project here - tinyurl.com/2dn4n6cb ) and away you go.
I've done two main things:
- I made one camera and mounted it and took a still with it every two minutes in daylight hours for over a year. When I get round to it I intend trying to assess which time is best across the year and select it to make a time lapse of my garden growing.
- I recorded 1 minute bursts triggered by motion, day and night, and captured foxes, hedgehogs, my now-departed cat and other creatures. That soft ware is quite neat as you can decide how much you want the view to change (i.e. how many pixels) to determine the trigger, and also you can mask areas of the pic to not be included in the trigger, so where I have a bush which waves in the wind I could just block it out.
I've done that with the camera in different places in the garden, powering it from an old car battery. I put an old plastic storage box on its side to put it all in to protect it from any rain or dew.
I can also take a pic of initiate a recording from my PC or phone on demand. It saves the files directly to my NAS so I only needed a small SD card.
The camera was my first Raspberry project and really quite satisfying. There are any number of how-to's on the internet, and it's really designed for kids so it is not hard to do, and requires no programming knowledge. The great thing is you can just take out the card and put it to one side so you can use the Pi for something else with a different SD card rather than destroying you work each time.
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Two Badgers and Fox with Five Cubs new
Two Badgers and Fox with Five Cubs new