My Introduction-Critter Cam Guy

When I moved to the Sierra Nevada foothills about 10 years ago I became interested in setting up cameras to capture local wildlife.  I went through multiple hardware styles:  from modifying used camcorders obtained on ebay, IP-webcam, even full mini-atx pc in a custom case.  Eventually, I was an early adaptor of the Raspberry Pi and now have at least 5 Pi cam scattered around the property. 

For more than a year I have been moving away from the Raspberry Pi.  The Pi is still a good platform but on the camera side they have not evolved as fast as other options, especially on a price/performance basis.

I hoped to set up a Jetson Nano to watch out for herons lurking around my koi pond.  Heron detection based on motion alone was difficult.  I created my own heron image set for object detection since I couldn't find one.  The model works OK on test images  but it was hard to do real world testing on something that happens sporadically.   The power and cooling requirements make me hesitant to deploy it.

I setup a couple ESP32-cams as provide alternate camera views which are streamed to the nano (or Pi) for analysis.  You can buy 4 or more ESP-32 cam's for the price of one Pi "system".

Packaging has been a consistent weakness all of my projects.  However, after dozens of iterations I've settled on a weather proof webcam case that works for me.