I am a biologist who frequently designs various devices for use in my field work. My latest challenge is to rig up a means of photographing birds (i.e. kingfishers) as they enter their burrows to feed nestlings. The problem is that they fly in there pretty fast. Ordinary game cameras or trail cameras (cameras that take pictures when an infrared motion detector is triggered) are much too slow. The fastest ones have a 0.75 second delay, and these birds fly about 10m per second--so they have gone 7 meters out of the camera range before the picture is taken. My colleagues and I would like to take pictures of the birds so we can determine which member of a breeding pair goes in, and so we can get the species and approximate size of the fish they are carrying.
The solution I have thought up is this: Have a video camera monitoring the burrow constantly and use some sort of delay or loop that allows the last 5 seconds or so of video to be stored temporarily. Then use a flex-sensor strip in the burrow to detect when a bird enters. When the flex-sensor is triggered, the stored video (from 5 or so seconds ago) would then be dumped into long-term memory for later retrival.
I have a bit of experience assembling ICs and intergrating devices with PIC microprocessors. I've identified some of the devices I would need (e.g. a video decoder to convert analog video to digital [SAA7130HL], and an MPEG encoder to convert YUV video to something small enough to store [ADV7181B]). But I am pretty clueless as to what sort of memory devices can be easily purchased and integrated (like drives for storing data on flash disks??), and I am even more clueless as to how I can engineer a delay of several seconds for the video feed. I know it is inappropriate to ask for someone to design this for me, so I am merely asking for help with the starting point. Any books, websites, or knowledge of similar devices would be most welcome.
Video logger for bird studies
Re: Video logger for bird studies
