Bullet Camera with barrel diameter of 75mm?

[TheWaterbug]

Exterior view is here, using one of my "new" $18 Dahua cameras

 

[Mike A.]

Not too bad for $18 huh?

Were those varifocal? I can't remember now.

Never mind. I see now that they are.

About what focal length and how far from the box? Just trying to judge the IR on it. Sometimes the same things will pop up cheap again there.

 

[pozzello]

as for the owl-box cam, you migtht think about flipping it upside down, then rotate the image in the GUI. this will place the IR led above the lens rather than underneath and may provide better lighting in there... better yet, add some external IR from the top of the box... also, does it go into color mode during the day? I wonder if the 'click' of the the IR cut filter being placed would bother any occupants...

also, it needs more owls...

 

[TheWaterbug]

About what focal length and how far from the box? Just trying to judge the IR on it. Sometimes the same things will pop up cheap again there.

DaftLogic says 53', which sounds about right;

Tonight I'll do some snapshots at full in and and full out.

 

[TheWaterbug]

as for the owl-box cam, you migtht think about flipping it upside down, then rotate the image in the GUI. this will place the IR led above the lens rather than underneath and may provide better lighting in there... better yet, add some external IR from the top of the box... also, does it go into color mode during the day? I wonder if the 'click' of the the IR cut filter being placed would bother any occupants...

also, it needs more owls...

Great idea on flipping the camera. Every time I think I've gone up the tree for the last time. . . .

It does go into color mode right now, but I can turn that off, at least until they move in. The clicking might prevent them from choosing the box, but once they've laid eggs they won't abandon them.

 

[TheWaterbug]

the big question is, how does it fit in your tube?

It fits very well! It's hard to take photos when I'm hanging in the tree, but here's the E891AB in a shorter ABS tube of the same diameter, connected to my SwarmTrap that will go live in a few weeks:

It tilts down a little bit, but that's not a disaster, and I can shim it up if I need to with a piece of folded paper or a wood chip.

If I put it into a longer tube it goes all the way in:

and then I can plug it up with that "biscuit" left over from my 3 1/4" hole saw:

One thing that's a big plus of the E891AB relative to my old RLC-411 is that the IR LEDs don't bounce off the glass plate.You can see here that they're flush up against it:

The RLC-411 had an integrated sun-hood that I had to saw off to get it closer to the glass, and even then I had to zoom in about 50% or else I'd see a ring of LEDs around the outside of the image. So for the OwlBox I actually left the glass plate off and trusted the camera to plug up the hole. Had I had the E891AB 3 months ago I would have put the glass into the OwlBox. But it's a bit late to do that now, because it's up the tree already, and difficult to take down.

The SwarmTrap is a bit shorter along the axis of view than my OwlBox, but you can get a rough sense for how the DOF will work. Here's the tape measure again, 6" from the edge of the plate.

Here's what the camera sees (click for full-res):

 

[TheWaterbug]

Great idea on flipping the camera. Every time I think I've gone up the tree for the last time. . . .

It does go into color mode right now, but I can turn that off, at least until they move in. The clicking might prevent them from choosing the box, but once they've laid eggs they won't abandon them.

Camera is flipped and mirrored! The image is much improved now that the LEDs aren't partially buried in the wood chips:

This is the during the day, and the light coming in through the entrance hole (upper right, but occluded by the divider panel) would make it capable of color imagery, but I have it fixed at B/W for now.

I'll post a before/after this evening, as the only comparable B/W archived footage I have pre-flip is in the evening.

 

[sebastiantombs]

I admire your determination and resolve with this project. You are certainly going the extra mile and I hope some owls move in soon.

 

[TheWaterbug]

So here's a night-time view from last night, unflipped:

compared with now, flipped. Way more better!

 

[TheWaterbug]

I admire your determination and resolve with this project. You are certainly going the extra mile and I hope some owls move in soon.

It'd be a real shame if I did this just for the spiders.

 

[TheWaterbug]

About what focal length and how far from the box? Just trying to judge the IR on it. Sometimes the same things will pop up cheap again there.

DaftLogic says 53'

, which sounds about right;

So here's all the way out. Yeah, it's an IR Cannon . Here's what the RLC-411 looked like at night, zoomed all the way out.

and all the way in. The glow is from the inside camera's illuminator.

I wish I had a little more lens on this, as this was my view when the RLC-411 was in this spot. But It's good enough for right now, especially for $18! If an owl ever moves in and I have lots of in/out activity I can re-evaluate my needs then.

 

[Mike A.]

So here's all the way out. Yeah, it's an IR Cannon . Here's what the RLC-411 looked like at night, zoomed all the way out...

That's pretty good. It looks like the IR has a more tight focus than with some which helps with distance. The cams with a lens on the IR LEDs seem to be like that more. Perfect for your use there.

 

[TheWaterbug]

Hah! Here's another bullet camera with a cylindrical cross-section of 2.70"! Amcrest IP5M-B1186EW-28MM , for $58 at amazon. Has anyone used one of these? There's only one mention of this family here on ipcamtalk.

I know I've already got a solution installed for the OwlCam, but the SwarmTrapCam now needs two new cameras. I may use one of my OEM IPC-HFW4431R-Z units for the inside, since I need the focusing feature. I just need to see if I can use a PVC coupler with a 3.5" ID as the new baffle (see above, on the brown wooden box) or as a sun-shade. And then I can use this Amcrest unit for the outside view.

I can always use a bunch of inexpensive bullets for my various projects, and if they have a cylindrical profile <3.0" then I can use my 3" ABS pipe when I want to look into a box.

 

[TheWaterbug]

I received the IP5M-B1186EW-28MM, and it looks fine for my intended application. It fits easily into my 3" ABS baffle, with room to spare:

as the max outer dimension is 2.748" with the sunshade attached or 2.580" with the sunshade removed. There's a little stud that the sunshade screws into, and which could be cut/filed off if necessary, but the barrel is slightly tapered down from the front, so I'm not sure removing it would reduce the actual bounding cylinder by much, if at all.

When shimmed into place so that it's flush up against the glass plate, there is only a tiny bit of reflection from the IR illuminators, which is fine for what I'm doing here. You can't even really see it unless I move it around. Focus at 18" is good, so I didn't even have to adjust it for close focus, though it looks to have very similar construction to the E891AB, so I could probably do that if I had to:

Click to pixel-peep at the full-res PNG. I have no idea why the web view downloads snapshots at PNG, when JPG is 5-10x more efficient. And the snapshot doesn't work at all from Safari, giving me a blank PNG.

Unlike the OwlCam, the action in the SwarmTrap will all be at the far end, as bees enter the box from the slot at the bottom, so 18" focus is fine. The glass windows on the right are for the a programmable white LED illuminator and yet another camera that I hope to use for a comb-building time-lapse.

Given the price I might just buy 3-4 of these. I might use one for the time-lapse camera if I can adjust it for close focus.

edit: The factory focus wasn't quite there at 18", so after my 6" experiment (below) I re-focused it for 18". My photos are external links, so they're now the updated captures with the better focus at 18".

 

[TheWaterbug]

Focus at 18" is good, so I didn't even have to adjust it for close focus, though it looks to have very similar construction to the E891AB, so I could probably do that if I had to.[snip]
Given the price I might just buy 3-4 of these. I might use one for the time-lapse camera if I can adjust it for close focus.

I wanted to check the close focus before buying another few units, so I took it apart. Yes, it's quite similar to the E891AB in construction. Pop the front-most plastic cover with a flat-head screwdriver or X-Acto knife, then remove 2 Torx screws to pull the inner assembly out:

Remove two small black Philips-head screws to remove the remaining plastics from the camera boards, and disconnect the IR illuminator cable:

Now you can cut/scrape/peel away the SuperGlue-y stuff holding the lens at the factory focus and adjust it:

Here it is, adjusted for 6 inches:

Click to pixel-peep at the full-res PNG.

I re-adjusted it back to 18", and I'm going to use it as my "inside" camera for the swarm trap. I'll buy at least 2 more--1 as the TimeLapse cam and 1 to replace a Coyote Trail camera.

 

[TheWaterbug]

I might end up using an old Reolink RLC-410 as the time-lapse camera. It fits well in the baffle:

and it was easy to open it up and adjust the focus:

Unlike with the Amcrest cameras I didn't even have to peel off the glue. I just twisted the front of the lens with some mild enthusiasm, and it rotated. Here it is, focused for about 5" and then looking at some honeycomb at 6"

Click here to pixel-peep the full res. I focused in closer than the existing comb because the bees will cluster on the comb, and they'll build more comb closer, and then closer again, if we're lucky.

But I might buy another IP5M-B1186EW-28MM and use that instead, because the FOV is wider, and it also looks like it focuses better across the plane of the comb.

 

[dudemaar]

https://www.axis.com/files/datasheet/ds_p1455le_t10152862_en_2101.pdf

 

[TheWaterbug]

Great idea on flipping the camera. Every time I think I've gone up the tree for the last time. . . .

Well, the last storm dropped a tree on the Ethernet cable, pulling the camera out of my ABS baffle and pulling the baffle off of the Owl box.

I retrieved the camera, only to find that there was cable damage, so the connection was intermittent. I cut off the RJ45 jack, intending to crimp on a new RJ45 plug and use a waterproof coupler to put everything back together, and found this:


Thank you, Lorex, for using non-standard wire colors for Ethernet.

A found this post which suggests the mapping of the Lorex E891AB RJ45 jack to standard Ethernet, and rearranged the info in that post to make it more readable for me, and presumably for anyone else who holds the wires in their left hand and the crimp tool in their right hand:


It took a looooong time to get this crimped, because the Lorex wires are really flimsy, and don't want to go into the plug properly, especially when there are only 6 wires and 8 slots. The trick was to pull 2" of solid-core wire from some scrap Cat5e I had laying around, and stuff 2 dummy wires into the jacket of the Lorex cable. Now I had 8 wires to arrange, and the solidity of the dummy wires helped keep the other ones in line.

The camera is working on my bench, and when I get the couplers I'll go back up the tree to reinstall it.

Note: a few of the posts on iFixit suggest that you need to common pins 4-5 and pins 7-8, but I found that to be unnecessary. My camera is working with just those 6 wires, and with a standard RJ45 coupler.

I hope this helps someone!

 

[Broachoski]

I checked out your YouTube videos, nice projects! You are a camera MacGuiver.

 

[TheWaterbug]

Hah! My exterior camera captured the exact moment that the interior camera got pulled off, 6 days ago: