Making our Meadow Blog

Camera still not working

I checked with Neil last week and he recommended checking the output voltage of the terminals. I have done this (6volts) and tried cutting off the ac adapter cable. The camera powered up enough to shut down, but only after repeated attempts. I'm starting to wonder if the a higher voltage is needed. The ac adapter is for 7.4V.

Hoodie tests

2 pictures showing the cobbled together hood and the effect
it has had: It only really seems to have worked at all against the ice relatively
close to the top of the window. It did work well against the snow however. I
wonder if a smaller version close to the camera lens position would work
better.

Trial off...for the moment

Tried the circuit with the S2IS camera when I got home and…nothing!
Retried with the ac adapter and this still worked fine. I suspect the problem
is with the plug which connects to the camera, everything else seems to be
working fine. I guess I will need to cannibalise the ac adapter (another one
bites the dust) but I will check with Neil in the morning.

Circuit picture

 

new pondcam

I had a quick look at the Pondcam earlier. It looked rather
sad, frozen up in the ice, with its poor quality webcam working hard to achieve
not very much. I thought again about how to achieve what we wanted and
reconsidered one of the designs someone suggested in the pub and I think it is
time to have another look at having a tube sunk into the pond. Clear acrylic
tube can be purchased here: http://www.clearplasticsupplies.co.uk/tubeclear.htm

clear acrylic sheet from here: http://www.hindleys.com/catalog/index.php?cPath=7_57_60_61_62_67

suitable adhesive here: http://www.hindleys.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=7_57_516&products_id=1934
(this was the product I used on the other designs so I know that it works when used
with a sheet end cap)

 

I propose to take a fairly wide tube (say 200mm in diameter)
to allow a lot of scope for positioning the camera and or lights and in
particular to reduce the impact of the curvature of the sides. I would then fix
a sheet with overlapping flanges to allow weights to be attached to the bottom.
This could then be sunk into the bottom of the pond, held in position with
weights and perhaps sand in the tube. The camera would need to be mounted on a
rod to allow changes in depth.

 

Just a idea…

Circuit Arrived

The circuit for the Canon S2IS with the timer etc has just
turned up, so I should be in position to test the whole thing at the weekend.

Plus tested an impromptu hood made from an old plastic propogator lid for 2 nights. Have had snow kept off and frost the night before so seems to work. Need to get the camera mounted to see if it interferes with the view of the camera and figure out some way of fixing it.

I have also conducted a basic trial testing 4 methods of water shedding treatment on polycarbonate: Rain X in liquid form, Rain X in spray form, potato (serioiusly) and washing up liquid. The night after i set it up it snowed and none of them worked - i think i need to wait for warmer weather.

The circuit is shown below. I will post an annotated version later.
 

Condensation and frost

I tried the S2IS with the Canon charger which arrived yesterday last night. Turning the power on and off definately works with the autoscript as long as the intervalometer is set to a single shot and the batteries are removed. 

Neil from REUK has just confirmed that the circuit is on its way so i should be able to start a full scale trial at the weekend.

In the meantime i need to address a more physical problem - dew is continuiing to affect the outside of the box's glazing and condensation is a problem on the inside. An even bigger problem is being caused at the moment with the 'extreme weather' (or 'winter' as we used to call it) with the dew freezing to a thick hoar frost which takes most of the day to melt.

I have tried treating the glazing with Rain X but as you can see the results are not really ideal.

A Trail Cam supplier (http://www.crowsystems.com/pic-tips.htm) recommends using a shelter or hood to prevent dew and frost falling onto the unit although ivgetting can be a problem. I have some sheets of plastic and i will try to rig something up later. South Cambs D C (here) recommend wiping with washing up liquid or potato, so i will try that on a spare piece of polycarbonate, along with another treatment with Rain-X.

The condensation may be solved with lots of silica gel bags so i will try that as well.

Woodcock

After a fairly uneventful morning a couple of days ago watching winter ducks I got home and pottered in the garden. About 3.15 a woodcock flew down 5 feet away and then bobbed about for 10 mins looking for worms completely oblivious. A really rare event: woodcocks are incredibly shy and don't generally appear in gardens.

HDR Time lapse cont...

Minvestigations into modifying the parameters to allow the intervalometer to make an HDR timelapse have so far been fruitless, the only method which seems to work is using the camera's inbuilt bracketing, but for some reason only for very small intervals. Having looked on the chdk forum i tried to use an alternative setup but this just caused the camera to crash. It also required the camera to be in continuous mode which it will not stay in when off. This should not be a problem when it is running properly since i will only set the number of shots to 1 and then have it set to autorun when the power is turned on by the timer. It does mean that i can't test it until i get the circuit back from Neil.

While i was doing what tests i could it became clear that the power consumption of the camera is greater than i thought - two evenings of tinkering have chomped through 8 AA batteries - this makes me nervous about whether the capacity of the battery i have will suffice and if i need to get a larger battery, will it still fit in the container. 

Thoughts on what to do

The snows have joined with general crapness to prevent us from going away. Just been having some extra thoughts about how to refine the process. One thing which I really would like to try is using the capacity of CHDK scripts to incorporate auto bracketing features which would mean that I can collect a number of images at each interval and superimpose them prior to the movie making process to get a much more realistic image.

There are a number of ways to achieve this. This page: http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/UBASIC/Scripts:_Make_ANY_Single-Shot_Intervalometer_into_an_HDR-Bracketing_Script

is very interesting, it makes it clear that just using the basic intervalometer script and some other settings in the CHDK menu enable a huge range of options including autobracketing. Unfortunately they all rely on the camera being set to Self Timer mode and when the camera is turned off and on again this mode is reset back to single mode again.

An alternative approach is to use the built in bracketing function. This is limited to 3 shots. It isn't ideal, 5 shots would give a greater tonal range. On the other hand of course they would need more memory. I estimate the number of days I would get out of a single 2Gb card which as far as i know is the largest memory card this camera will take.

 

Resolution/ no shots	640 x 480 VGA Basic	640 x 480 VGA Normal	640 x 480 VGA Fine	M2 1600 x 1200 Basic	M2 1600 x 1200 Normal	M2 1600 x 1200 Fine
3 shots	105	63	38	32	19	10
5 Shots	63	38	23	19	12	6

Only M Basic on a 3 shot system or VGA normal on a 5 shot system are in anyway viable, i was hoping to use M2 normal and prefereably with 5 shots. So i have the following options:

can a larger memory card be used? (must be SD not SDHC)his is now as old fashioned as the 128 Mb CF card I was looking for earlier on - they are all SDHC cards. I have found a 4Gb one at amazon, but they I am not sure it is not an SDHC card - will have to see when it turns up.
find an HDR script to enable 5 shots to be taken - there are several i just need to select the most appropriate. However it seems that the maximum size card i can find is  4Gb. This would mean that the ideal size would still need changing every 24 days if it is run on the 5 shot system.

I will trial the 3 shot system using the inbuilt camera bracketing