PIR Sensor ultra sensitive

What's the actual goal? What is the use-case? By 'trigger a smart phone aimed at the target area' do you mean to trigger a smart phone camera? Or something else?

If all you wish to do is to take photos of them, then if they move slowly, you could simply just take a photo say every minute without sensing them, because storage is cheap. Then there would be no need for a sensor other than the camera, and you could process the photos to extract the ones that are sufficiently different, to identify the interesting photos.

If there's some other aim in mind, then it would help to know it, to come up with an appropriate solution.

Hello,

Goal is to figure out where these bugs are getting into the house and then plugging the holes. They can get in the tiniest cracks. They are insidious and sneaky little buggers. They leave a trail pheromones for others to follow when they find a new way in. They are to be admired really. They are testing of my tenacity and resolve. I have organic vegetarian friends who have resorted to spraying their whole house with pesticides to stop them!

PIR would trigger phone or camera to take photo when one goes by which then identifies an area they are getting in.

Over the past year I have diligently sealed up cracks and holes where they were getting in. We are getting 80% less getting inside than the last season but still an annoying 12-24 per day on sunny days in the winter in NW Oregon.

I have thought about time lapse every 15-30 seconds or so, but I would have to sit there and view 5,000 pictures over a 24 hr of recording to spot any that might go by!

I have done a fair amount of Photoshop work but I'm not familiar with how to identify "sufficiently different" photos. That may be the simplest solution if you could teach me how to do that!

Thank you so much for your help

Tony D

There are some interesting solutions described here:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/189943/how-can-i-quantify-difference-between-two-images

There's a simple one mentioned there which is to just have some code to compare the jog file sizes, because any image with sufficiently different content may have a noticeably different file size. 

To test this, you could take a photo of an example location, and then add some artificial bugs if none exist, using say photoshot, and then subjecting the images to some of the solutions mentioned at that link, to see what works best. 

One other approach could be to try a microwave sensor. Sometimes they can detect very slight changes (including vibration of the mount). But it would require experimentation, I have no idea if it would detect a slow-moving bug. There's an example microwave detector article here:

/technologies/embedded/b/blog/posts/experimenting-with-microwave-based-sensors-for-presence-detection#mcetoc_1h0c077bia

PIR is unfortunately very unlikely to work, because the amount of heat energy will be tiny, and most PIR sensors need sufficient movement too.

There are some interesting solutions described here:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/189943/how-can-i-quantify-difference-between-two-images

There's a simple one mentioned there which is to just have some code to compare the jog file sizes, because any image with sufficiently different content may have a noticeably different file size. 

To test this, you could take a photo of an example location, and then add some artificial bugs if none exist, using say photoshot, and then subjecting the images to some of the solutions mentioned at that link, to see what works best. 

One other approach could be to try a microwave sensor. Sometimes they can detect very slight changes (including vibration of the mount). But it would require experimentation, I have no idea if it would detect a slow-moving bug. There's an example microwave detector article here:

/technologies/embedded/b/blog/posts/experimenting-with-microwave-based-sensors-for-presence-detection#mcetoc_1h0c077bia

PIR is unfortunately very unlikely to work, because the amount of heat energy will be tiny, and most PIR sensors need sufficient movement too.