The day arrived to finally put the Nemo Discovery Apparatus out into the wild! I lashed up the solar panel to my backpack and headed down to the river.
I can't help but laugh when I see this photo, the solar panel is borderline too big for a backpack, but it does put out the watts!
Putting the solar panel in the water was really just to validate the proof of concept. The pool noodle pontoons could drastically be improved for a long-term deployment.
Placing the camera into the water for the first time! No Leaks
Giving the system a final test from motioneye on my phone.
Everything looks good.
To capture video I ssh'd into the PI on the nemo WIFI network and executed the raspivid command as:
raspivid -t $((10*60*1000)) -o nemo.h264 -v
I used some inline bash arithmetic since the time parameter is taken in ms. Luckily I didn't get burned, but as soon as I got to the river I realized I should have installed the screen terminal. If WIFI were to have dropped out between the laptop and PI, the ssh session would have forced raspivid to close prematurely. Thankfully, this did not happen to me . Perhaps there is other Linux foo to avoid this problem too.
Looking down into the water I could see everything very clearly. Here is a riverside photo where I can see a crayfish walking around.
Assorted Clips Captured
This is just a collection of raw clips captured with the HQ Camera, feel free to fast-forward.
I had to lower the lens aperture to try and get a usable depth of field. At first I was filming in f/8. Later on I knocked down the aperture to somewhere midway between f/8 and f/16.
Next time I place a Newark order I will add a 6mm Wide Angle Lens6mm Wide Angle Lens to my shopping cart.
I think a large piece of black cardstock on the top inside of the container would have cut down on sunlight reflecting of the inside of the container.
I hope you enjoyed reading along as much as I enjoyed making and documenting this project.
Thanks again Element14!
References
https://ontarionature.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/crayfish_apr08.pdf
https://www.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/species-especes/publications/baitfish-poissons-appats/page01-eng.html
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