I had been looking for a trail or bird camera for the bird feeder & decided on the CEYOMUR CY95 trail camera. I had considered getting the birdcam, but this camera seemed like more flexible option. The motion detection would not work on the birds & I could not get close enough and birds still be in focus. I then discovered some YouTube videos where a couple of people had put reading glasses in front of their cameras to get shots of birds. I thought a closeup filter would be a good choice for this, so I started looking at how I could attach a bracket to this trailcamera. I could not attach it from above because of the solar panel, so the simplest way seemed to be to wrap it around like a pair of eyeglasses, or should I say a single glass like for cyclops. 37mm closeup filter is the smallest reasonably priced lens I could find, ($11 for a set of 4 Vivitar Closeup lenses). Before buying them, I manually put 3 different strength 58mm filters in front of it since I had those & it looked it would work, so I ordered them. I initially made the design as a drop in slot, but then realized I should be able to use threads. I didn’t need to do too much test prints. Here are all the versions I had.
My brother said this eyeglass reminded him of the little Minion character.
I started to used Fusion 360 to design this, but Autodesk does not make tolerances for threading easy. Not sure why they have never done that, but it is very simple in openscad. For my printer, I had use a .3mm clearance around what the threads would normally be.
I took a sample photo using the WiFi connection with it this far away & it looks really sharp. Just a question now if the motion detect will work correctly now. This design partially covers the indicated light & light sensor, so that could be a problem. I could probably cut out the plastic in that portion of the threads, but taking a photo from tablet via WiFi does work. That might not be a problem. Time will tell.
I did find a 27mm Closeup filter from Helipan, but it is $45 for each filter. If I was buying for my real camera, I probably would have bought it. I did not want to sink much money into this in case it does not work well. I am testing it with a +1 filter to start with. This Vivitar set comes with a +1, +2, +4 & +10.
I used a 0.4mm brass nozzle & adaptive print height with 0.12mm height where the threads were.
The 1st time I tried this, the motion detector didn’t work, but after setting it back out a 2nd time, it did work. The only difference between 1st & 2nd time that I can recall was I used the android app on a tablet to test the view before leaving it be. Here are a couple of the photos. This was with a +1 closeup filter. I will try a +2 filter next to see if sharpness is any better. I have a couple of short videos that came out pretty good also.
I just found a tremendous speed increase with openscad. Every once in a while when I get fed up with how slow openscad is with the final render of parts that have any complication to them like threads in this case, it takes several minutes for the final render. I had not done a google search for how to speed it up in a while & just found a setting that only takes a second or so to do this final render now. I closed the program & opened it back up because I thought it was using a cache of it instead of rendering from scratch. The only thing I did different was enable manifold in preferences. Here is the info on that. I origonally tried fast-csg , but that had some errors in it & was not nearly as fast as the manifold method. Here are the links to those 2 web pages that describe them. GitHub - elalish/manifold: Geometry library for topological robustness
I am getting some reasonable pictures, although I have to take a lot to get a flight shot. And of course the occasional white squirrel that tries to get some seed from the squirrel resistant feeder. Fastest shutter speed on this trailcamera is 1/30 of second, so there will always be some blur in the wings. Some of these are clipped from the video using ffmpeg to extract the frames. Not sure if video is faster shutter speed or not, but the frame rate shows 30 fps.
You mean something like this setup? Touch Cam - a Raspberry Pi Camera : 26 Steps (with Pictures) - Instructables
Only problem is not being waterproof, but I only use it when I am at home probably would not be a problem. I probably you should look into using my Canon DSLR as it has remote firing as that would give me really sharp images with faster shutter speed. Might also be able to find a motion detector for it. I have not looked for one of those in a few years & might be more available now.
