"Catching" nature with a DIY camera trap

Easy open-source tech helps anyone appreciate our living world

Jan 14, 2022

In this first installment of Make things better, I share a handy DIY camera trap designed by a muti-institutional team out of England. They’ve made it completely open-source, so makers far and wide are giving it a shot - including many who never thought of themselves as “makers.” The result is nothing short of inspirational and gives me hope that anyone can help make things - our world - better. ~JRC

The MyNatureWatch camera in action. Camera build and images by Natalie Shersby. Used with permission.

One of the greatest challenges conservationists face is getting people to notice and care about what's at stake. Instead of stopping to smell the roses (or listen to birds, think about trees, or watch a bee), we tend to immerse ourselves in the modern world, ignoring the great decline in native species and habitats all around. This learned ambivalence deprives many of understanding, appreciating, and conserving nature. But what if there was a way - perhaps a maker way - to get the masses (i.e., most of us) looking at wild things again? A London-based research team wondered just that, and with a lot of help from the BBC, they came up with a picture-perfect solution: a simple DIY camera trap that lets ordinary people make something themselves and then begin looking anew at the life that surrounds us.

Camera traps have been around for decades. They're essentially weatherproofed cameras with an infrared (IR) sensor that picks up motion in the environment. When an animal or other movement (like a wind-blown branch) triggers the sensor, it initiates the camera to take a picture or video. These images, along with time and date stamps, are stored for later retrieval. Wildlife biologists and hunters use these commercially available devices to identify and track animals for research and sport.

Camera traps have become essential conservation tools for documenting animal diversity worldwide. Their use has resulted in rare glimpses of elusive species like jaguars, pangolins, and Sumatran rhinos, to name but a few. Camera traps enable us to see a hidden world by capturing invaluable data on species presence, migration patterns, feeding preferences, and other behavioral traits that people sitting behind blinds for hours could never witness.

Citizen scientists could significantly enhance conservation efforts by broadening camera trap utilization, further extending critical wildlife surveillance. Camera traps could also aid conservation when used by regular citizens documenting wildlife for fun, thereby improving our collective awareness of nature.

If only camera traps were more accessible and user-friendly.

But the cost, and frankly the often-poor quality of images from these clunky tools, make such leaps into the mainstream somewhat limited. After all, most of us now expect National Geographic-quality photo capabilities in our pockets. Grainy surveillance-type images from bulky boxes are anything but Insta-worthy shots. Potential nature photographers and latent conservationists often forego commercially avialable devices altogether owing to their lack of user-friendliness.

Recognizing the limits of available camera traps for mainstream use, a team from the Interaction Research Studio at Northumbria University and the Design Products Programme at the Royal College of Art looked at how they could improve them for the general public. More precisely, this team of designers and researchers (the “design team”) wanted to see if a DIY camera trap, if easy to build and inexpensive, would promote engagement with nature as well as digital making.

With funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the team ultimately designed the My NatureWatch camera and created a free set of plans plus a website and social media presence to promote it. And, if that weren't enough, they partnered with the BBC show Springwatch and unveiled the design on British national television in 2018.

The device itself is impressive. It consists of just a few readily available components that are easy to purchase online. The widely popular RaspberryPi Zero W single-board computer is at its heart, which costs about US$15. This do-all tiny computer is used in many tech projects and has enough power for almost any DIY gizmo you can imagine. For the My NatureWatch camera, the team paired the RaspberryPi Zero with a five-megapixel miniature camera module. These are equally inexpensive, coming in at just under twenty dollars.

All that’s left is a simple heat sink to keep the processor cool, a USB chargeable power supply, and a micro SD card to store the software and save the images. With these, the guts of this camera can be all had for around 50 bucks. Making it even simpler, the software code for the camera is free - it’s completely opens-source - and is available along with the plans for the camera on their website (mynaturewatch.net). The user can download these on a home computer, install the code on the micro SD, and finally plug it into the RaspberryPi. How to do all this is included with the plans.

As for the housing, there are several options, and the designers encourage innovation here. The standard suggestion is to use a plastic food container with a hole in the side for the camera. But some have used more basic designs like zip-close plastic bags, while others have gone the elaborate route with fancy 3D printed enclosures. Regardless, the goal is to protect the electronics from the elements while allowing the camera a clear field of view.

My NatureWatch cameras can be configured to take both still images and video clips of their subjects. There are even instructions on how to rig up the camera with night vision. Perhaps best of all, this nifty DIY camera trap foregoes using IR sensors and instead utilizes computer vision software that analyzes the field of view and recognizes when something's moving. This strategy reduces the number of false positives, a flaw in many IR-triggered devices.

In all, the My NatureWatch camera is a versatile camera trap on a budget that trumps the expensive commercial ones in many ways.

Upon initial airing of the project on BBC, social media soon blew up with people posting images and videos from their own My NatureWatch cameras under the hashtag #MyNatureWatch. In 2019, less than a year since unveiling the design, the design team reported that between 1250 to 1500 people built and used their own My NatureWatch cameras. And these trends continue, now three years later.

Upon doing a quick social media search, I found a steady stream of online posts by people making and using their DIY camera traps. I reached out to a few of these, and here's what I heard from one of them, Eve Englefield, Conservation Scientist and Senior Programme Officer at SEED Madagascar:

I'm definitely not a tech person...[I] found it really easy to set up as a lockdown project in a specially created nestbox, hoping for more this year! It's a great way to make the opportunities of camera traps more accessible.

As the above anecdote suggests, one of the overwhelming results of this project was the sheer number of those new to digital making who decided to give it a try. The design team attributes this to the simplicity of the build, availability of components, and its overall low cost (not to mention the all-out promotion of the device).

Eve Englefield @evegrace

Nestflix and chill? #springwatch #nestcam #mynaturewatch @mynaturewatch

Eve Englefield’s Twitter post on her MyNatureWatch camera experience. Note: clicking the video play button will open a link to Twitter.com. Also, note her catchy “nestflix” pun. Link used with permission.

And while these factors certainly contribute to My NatureWatch camera's success, there's more to it than being "cheap and easy." Educators increasingly use these readily assembled cameras as teaching aids for coding and related technology subjects - because they're engrossing. IT systems specialist and STEM educator Natalie Shersby attests to this:

[My NatureWatch camera build] was such an interesting project to share with my daughter first and then later with my CoderDojo members. Such an engaging topic and a real hands-on making workshop for the kids.
My daughter would have been around 8 or 9 when we first made one... [and] she was obsessed with it for a good while. She took it to her grandparent's house to capture wildlife in their garden, and we also took it on holiday with us to Sherwood Forest.

Caught at the feeder by the MyNatureWatch camera built by Natalie Shersby. Used with permission.

Indeed, the great benefit of My NatureWatch cameras extends far beyond either technology or simple nature watching. The fact that regular individuals can create something with their own hands and use it to capture nature in vivid high-resolution images - that's not just making or watching - it's empowering.

The designers elaborate on this in their 2019 paper:

We suggest that the primary value of My Naturewatch Cameras is in allowing glimpses of the 'parallel lives' of the animals who are our neighbours. Moreover, we suggest that the intimacy of these encounters is heightened by the fact that the cameras are not well finished, commercial products, but DIY research products that people make themselves, using materials they have on hand, and close to the places they will be deployed.

From tech to teaching, engineering, and the environment - My NatureWatch camera does it all - and on a budget. Sure, some individuals want to use My NatureWatch cameras to have fun and take a few pics for their social media feeds. And others may want no more than a simple build to get started in coding and digital making. But many new to observing nature - and making - are engaging for the first time in both with this device. That makes the My NatureWatch camera an enticing gateway into a much broader world, both natural and created.

Acknowledgments

The bulk of information for this article I gleaned from the white paper listed below by William Gaver et al. (2019).

Special thanks to Eve Englefield and Natalie Shersby for contributing.

J ROBERT CLARK - MAKES

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