Homebrew Trailcameras

[Grizzly95]

The guys at work were having fun with my cam today. They came up to me and said that I got a shot of a deer, here is the buck I got.

[BaseballStud20]

Ill take one of those templates too bigdave.

[BobR]

Griz,  The board you have will work on any Sony W series camera except for the 120

[BobR]

  This is the W200 that my son gave me Saturday. It had a busted LCD. It took about ten minutes to replace the LCD from a parts camera that I had. That is the busted LCD in the bowl. In this picture, the camera is back together with the wires coming out of the opening for the microphone.



  Soldering two wires together is hard because you have the soldering iron in one hand and the solder in the other. The wires must be held together, and they cannot be moved until the solder cools. Both wires must be tinned. You can see in this picture that I taped a piece of cardboard to the top of the camera. The servo is taped to this cardboard, and the red wire is taped so that it is in contact with the other red wire. This frees up both hands to do the soldering. After the solder cooled, I taped two more wires so they would be in contact. Then I did the same for the last two wires.



  In this picture, you can see all three wires have been soldered



  Now I am coating the solder connections with liquid tape. The solder joints must be covered well on all sides



  After the liquid tape is hardened, I brought the wires together and started coating them with the liquid tape.




  You can see that I cut a piece of double sided stickyback foam pad the size of the servo. The pad was stuck to the camera, and the servo pressed down and stuck to the pad. A small piece of foil duct tape also connects the servo to the camera.. Tomorrow, I will remove the three wires from the male servo plug and connect my phone wire to make the cable that goes to the control board. I will also add more liquid tape to the three wires coming out of the camera.

[Grizzly95]

BobR are the screens interchangeable in some of these models?

[BobR]

  I am not sure Griz. I will have to compare some broken LCD's that I have. The 80, 90 and 200 have the same LCD, but I have to compare the two ribbon cables that connect them to the camera boards. The LCD on the 55 is different. Baseballstud20 bought a W80 that is not working. Tonight, instead of telling him how to take his camera apart and repairing it in a PM, I will do that here so others can learn how to repair their camera. I am locating parts for his camera now.
Bob

[BobR]

Baseballstud20,   I have never had a camera doing what yours is, but I have seen them on ebay. This is usually a problem with the extending lens. I did a Google search for your problem. In the search box,  I typed  "Sony DSC-W80 error message turn camera off and back on. This link is from that search. Read this and see if you can fix your camera. If this does not help, you need a new lens assembly.
Post a picture of your camera ( front and back shots) and I will explain how to remove the lens assembly from your pictures. I have a couple that I can send to you, but I am not sure if they work. Watch for a broken parts camera that has a bad LCD on ebay.
Bob

http://www.fixya.com/support/t185137-sony_dsc_w80

[BaseballStud20]

Alright thanks a lot Bob. Ill check it out once it gets here and see if I can fix it.

[gkowen]

Here is my first pic.  I need to find a better trail. The camera was there 4 days and only took 2 pics.

Here is a link to the original pic (large size)   http://i266.photobucket.com/albums/ii258/gkowen/DSC00525a.jpg

And here is my cropped and resized photo

[BobR]

  Nice picture Greg. I am anxious to see pics from your 150. Keep up the good work.
Bob

[gkowen]

What is nice about these cameras is no false triggers. In 4 days, with wind and some snow, not one false trigger.  I am going to do a speed test tomorrow on the w80 and w150. What I plan to do is this.  Set the camera time to my watch, let the camera go to sleep and then walk in front and see how long it takes to take a pic from turned off. I will do this with flash on and flash off. Then I plan to time how many pics each camera will take in one minute with flash on and flash off. I think it would be interesting to benchmark each new camera that way.

I am just waiting for my UV filter to arrive for the w150 then it will go out.

[Grizzly95]

How far should the sensor be from the fresnel lense? My cam seems to be working fine, but like anything I have I am always curious to tweak and check differences. And I wasn't paying attention in class on saturday.

[gkowen]

The standard round fresnel lens should be 0.65 inches from the PIR. Make sure the grooves are on the inside towards the PIR.

[Grizzly95]

OK that is what I read on Yeti, I was just curious if a different distance has worked better for anyone.

[olsy]

Amazon.com has Pelican Cases on Sale...

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001CNI4E8/ref=noref?ie=UTF8&s=photo