Making a cheap and flexible trailcam with Raspberry Pi

I know there are quite a few versions of this around, but after seeing the short item on Springwatch about a DIY Raspberry Pi based I thought it would be good project for any at the local U3A who still fancied a play with technology, but wanted some help / backup.

So I started at the recommended web site, ordered a kit, nicked a powerbank from another project and set off.

The I made case is distinctly Blue Peter, but functional and I used a glue gun for the first time in my life (only somewhat messilly!) I used a recycled carry out box, some cardboard and the top of an old bottle as a lens shield.

After a couple of hiccups due to not setting up the config files properly on the memory card (so the wifi didn't hook up), I just used the supplied config and it was up and running.

The powerbank (Anker Powercore 10000) works a treat and will run the setup for much more than 24 hours.

BUT

The software is pretty limited and limited to pi zero W and pi B 3 and the only network option is to setup as a wifi hotspot - so to use the camera you need to change the wifi  setup on whatever device you use (phone, tablet, laptop etc) to the camera (and of course loose all acess to the rest of the world in the meantime). Clearly the bunch of folks who wrote this software have such large gardens their home wifi doesn't reach the edges.

For me, I'd rather be able to use any sensible network option - including a private hotspot if appropriate, but also using any existing wifi, or even wired LAN (allowing the use of power over ethernet so there is not battery problem).

A bit of digging suggested that this motion software would work well even on a Pi Zero. It works well, and does seem to do everything necessary pretty well. It also enables multiple cameras (even on multiple Raspberry Pis) to be managed through a single interface. This package however, loads a Pi Zero quite heavily and this means that video frame size has to be scaled back to avoid overloading the a Pi Zero.

I'm also looking at RPi-Cam-Web-Interface, which is written to exploit the Raspberry Pi Camera with its built in GPU support. Although not quite as sophisticated as motion, this may be a better option overall for a Pi Zero in particular. I'll post more about this later.

The gory details of the entire Raspberry Pi build process for motioneye on raspbian lite are below (elapsed time on pi Zero in brackets):