HOW TO MAKE
A MOTION-SENSITIVE
CAMERA TRAP
One man’s journey
to controlling
a Nikon.
BY TOM IGOE
In any project, you learn a lot from the mistakes you make along the way. I recently set out to build a camera trap (hidden automated camera) for a
wildlife observation project on which I’m collaborating. Here’s the story of
all the things I learned getting it to work.
Basically, I needed to make a motion-sensitive
remote control for my Nikon camera. I was inspired
by Matt Mets’ Nikon Camera Intervalometer project
(
makezine.com/go/mets), which mimics the pocket
remote trigger that comes with some Nikon cameras by running an infrared LED from an Arduino
microcontroller.
Using Mets’ NikonRemote library, you can take
a picture with just 2 lines of code: one to initialize
the output pin and one to actually snap the photo.
Here’s an example that takes a photo once per
second:
#include <NikonRemote.h>
NikonRemote remote( 12);
void setup() {
}
// IR LED on pin 12
void loop() {
remote.Snap();
delay(1000);
}
The code couldn’t be any simpler. But naturally,
the first time I tried it, it didn’t work.
Photography by Tom Igoe
60 Make: Volume 22
