Hi all, I’m trying to come up with a way to watch our zoo animals overnight. Our zoo is small and broke, and our security company quoted us $2500 for one IR camera and DVR. That’s too much!
I’m sure we can come up with a cheaper solution. Here’s what we need it to do:
Some kind of device to record the video. Would a regular laptop or DVR be suitable? We’d have to have it secure, maybe locked in a box padlocked to a fence? It obviously needs power too, and there are a few outlets around the zoo, but not at every exhibit. Do these things run on batteries? The zoo also doesn’t have wifi, so we can’t stream it straight online.
Obviously, we can’t set up lights without disturbing the animals’ regular day/night cycle: an infra-red night-vision type camera, the more detail it can pick up, the better.
Relatively portable, so we can switch it between exhibits
Any easy way to watch the footage, e.g., a fast-forward or time-lapse function.
I saw several instructables tutorials on how to pull the IR filter out of a cheap webcam - would that work? Maybe if we also set up a few sources of IR, like LEDs?
Any ideas? Tell me if I’m dreaming, too, and that $2500 is the bare minimum outlay. Maybe I can get a grant, or ask around for donations…
I don’t really know anything about this, but a friend of mine has set up an IR still camera w/ motion sensor on his own, so it can’t be too pricey.
Here’s a google product search result for an outdoor IR video camera at around $50. Not sure what else you need to use it, but it sounds like less than $2500 may be attainable.
You can get camera kits intended for birds’ nest boxes- designed to work in low light (including ones with infrared- would a standard webcam pick that up well?), for a real cheap option. You can probably find battery powered ones if you look hard enough, but most I’ve seen appear to be mains. example
I’m not sure how well they’d do on larger areas though, you might need to add a bit more IR light.
Just to narrow my search - are you looking for live video? It sounds like you want to record nocturnal critters and then later show them during the day?
Does it have to be on computer, or is TV playback OK?
If it is, I’m wondering if a hard drive based DVR might be good - they can record hundreds of hours.
The price of wireless IP cameras has come down so much that I think they a better choice for a surveillance system. I guess the bottom line is how good does the system have to be.
For example, here is a fixed mount outdoor camera. It transmits color during the day and goes to black and white at night. It can see in complete darkness up to 26ft ( but figure good illumination might be 1/2 to 2/3 of that) with an array of IR LEDs. The cost? $93 with shipping.
The problem is that you need a wireless router to pick up the signal and relay it to whatever landline based internet you have there. The routers themselves are cheap and can probably handle at least 16 cameras as long as you don’t need full motion 640x480 video.
If you have no way of connecting to the internet, it should still be possible, but at that point you will need a cheap computer in addition to the router, a cell phone that can be tethered to the computer, and a really, really good wireless data plan. And even then, if you have $2500 to start with, you might be able to do all of that and walk away with some change.
You talked about security before. So what are you trying to do?
[ul][li]Watch the animals to protect them from trespassers hurting them/turning them loose?[/li][li]Watch the animals to make sure they don’t get hurt/hurt each other at night?[/li][li]Watch for vandals breaking in and damaging zoo property?[/li]Something else?[/ul]
Sounds like a good opportunity to do a candlelight dinner in the zoo fundraiser. Do you have any nocturnal animals that the keepers can give a good talk about, followed up with dinner and an exhibit?
A bit more detail: we’re just looking to observe the animals’ actions overnight. The zoo already has cameras, alarms and motion detectors for security, monitored by a third party. That’s who gave me the $2500 quote.
Ideally, we’d like to have the camera running all night, then be able to quickly review the footage the next day, e.g., run it in fast forward to get an overview of the nighttime behavior. Then, if there’s anything interesting, we’d want to watch it at normal speed, save clips to show other zoo staff, or kids in our camps, or post on our website.
An example: here in the education department, we have an emperor scorpion called Violet. Several times over the past few months, we’ve found her in the next enclosure, which contains our African giant millipedes, Reduce and Recycle. They’re too big for Vi to try and eat, but it was probably pretty scary for everyone, if invertebrates can feel fear. Noone knew how she was ending up in the next enclosure, and some peoples’ first inclination was to blame the last person handling her, that they’d spaced out and somehow put her back through the wrong door.
Anyway, if we had this camera set up, we could point it at her enclosure overnight and see her climbing the walls and squeezing through the tiny hole around the light fixture. (Our low-tech soloution was dusting the hole with corn starch, which worked, but didn’t give us any neat footage of how squeezy emperor scorpions are!)
Thanks for the suggestions so far, I hope this makes things clearer!
If I had money, and heard about such an event, I would so go to something like this. I love the idea of having a dinner in a zoo with all the animals that are too sleepy during normal business hours up and about so we can truly see how awesome they are.
Actually, we already do sleepovers and flashlight tours, they’re very popular and a good revenue stream for us - not too much work, and great payoff.
However, because our presence is out of the ordinary, we assume the animals are also acting unusually in our presence. We’d really like to see what they’re up to on a normal night, hence, a camera.
Update: through judicious Googling, I uncovered the Meerkam and, Googling some more, it looks like it’s a rebranded inspection camera. (Warning PDF) Am trying to work out specs, e.g., will it record all night? Battery life? And I’ll let you know (maybe with videos!) how it works!