Approached by editor Nicole Kobie, I was asked to work on a project involving the Pi and its camera for the feature. While, given a larger page count, there are plenty of exciting hardware-based possibilities there, I opted for a tutorial on using software packages to do motion detection and image capture – turning the Pi into a cheap wildlife camera.
The process is pretty simple: using freely published open-source software coupled with the software supplied with the Raspberry Pi Camera Module itself, the system takes low-resolution snapshots every few seconds. Each snapshot is compared to the snapshot taken just prior; if the image is different enough, a full-resolution still is captured.
It’s an easy way of doing pseudo-motion-detection, but it works remarkably well. It’s even possible to discount sections of the image – if, for example, the camera is near trees that wave in the wind, or a busy main road.
My project was, I’m proud to say, picked as the headline for the feature, as demonstrated by the cover splash. If you fancy building a wildlife camera of your own, you can pick up PC Pro Issue 213 at all good newsagents, most supermarkets, and digital distribution services including but not limited to Zinio.
Oh, and as an added bonus: the example ‘wildlife’ captured for the article was my cat, Zumi, in his magazine début.