Building a solar, GSM remote camera to send photos to phone

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Hi All,

I’m a newbie to the electronics world, so this might be biting off more than I can chew… but I thought I’d see how complicated it is.

Up till now, I’ve bought trail cameras to monitor a remote feed bin for animals. Given I’d like to deploy a number of cameras, I’m wondering if building my own is a cost effective option. Cost and reliability are the 2 main factors - as far as functionality, I just want a camera that I can txt and it will send me a MMS of the feed bin (only needs to be during the day). If it had a timer to automatically send it twice a day (on email or txt), that’d be a bonus. It would need to be solar powered as it needs to be set-and-forget.

Just interested to know how hard this would be and approx cost? Any thoughts?

Cheers

Pete

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Hi Peter,

People have achieved things similar to this with Raspberry Pi’s and Pi cameras. Instead of texting the Pi, you can send a command over Wifi/Twitter/email/etc and it could send a photo back over email or upload to a shared location. This could also be easily done with a timer if you wanted to. If you want to use solar, you could combine a solar panel with a LiPo battery.

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