[Makers] What is everybody making?

[Akkana Peck]

Great thread!

Robyn, I'd love to hear some of your experiences with that mind
control hardware. That's been on my wishlist for a long time but
I've never gotten around to actually ordering it. Partly because I
haven't come up with a good project to justify it.

And Michelle, weather stations have also been on my wish list
so I want to hear about that when you get there -- maybe we can work
on them at the same time and compare notes.

My latest project is an on-again-off-again Crittercam, an automated
Raspberry Pi-based camera that's supposed to run all night, sense
wildlife moving nearby and take photos. But motion detection turns
out to be a hard problem, at least if you want to catch birds, mice
and rabbits, not just human-sized animals. I've tried image
processing (comparing each image to the previous one), a PIR
(passive IR) detector, a sonar rangefinder, and combinations of two
or more of those at the same time; but no matter what I try, I can't
seem to find settings that catch passing animals but don't give me a
jillion false positives at sunrise when the shadows are moving.

I've documented most of what I've done so far on my blog:
http://shallowsky.com/blog/tags/crittercam/
The only thing I've done since then is to hook up a battery, one
of those USB batteries they sell for recharging phones and tablets;
but even the big 10,000mAh battery wasn't enough to run my camera
all night, so that's another thing that's tabled until I have the
energy to figure some power saving ideas.

        ...Akkana