RoadTest: Pi NoIR and Catch Santa Challenge
Author: jwier92
Creation date:
Evaluation Type: Independent Products
Did you receive all parts the manufacturer stated would be included in the package?: True
What other parts do you consider comparable to this product?:
What were the biggest problems encountered?:
Detailed Review:
I am very thankful for the opportunity to review the Pi NoIR camera. I have been wanting to use this camera and the normal Pi camera (with the IR filter installed) to take time lapse and capture images of our house being built and wild life at our new property.
Most of my initial testing had to do with testing mostly dark settings and IR LEDs. So lets get started.
When I first go this camera, I mounted it in the case that was provided. Afterwards I powered up the Raspberry Pi, enabled the camera and rebooted and could not get it to work, as raspistill reported that no camera was found. After testing many things, I turned to the power of Google, which guided me to a forum discussion. After much digging I was able to find that the connector right to the top of the lens was not fully seated. I am going to assume this happened when I put it in the case. After plugging it back in everything worked fine. Here is a picture of that connector.
Quality is good. In normal light the pictures are a bit off color, but the real magic comes with low or no normal visible lighting. Here are some images taking with raspistill and picamera in Python 3.2. This was taken with a 12 volt IR LED board with 30 LED's on it and a mostly dark room.
The auto mode in picamera with Python did not adjust as well as when using auto mode in raspistill. With the picamera I turned up the shutter speed to 300000 ms to get a good picture and the pictures were blury if there was motion. I did get the same results with raspistill in night mode.
This will work find for my use. I will have a wild life camera that will be connected to the network and sharing information as it happens. The only thing that I will need more of is flooding the setting with more IR LEDs. I did test with some IR LEDs that were not already on the security camera board (24 LED's) and the setting was a bit darker. I will be getting and testing with another wave length as all the ones I had were 850nm.
