« Finally
a first true article about “photographic traps”!
Indeed, a
few days after the birth of this blog, here comes the first article. The
previous ones were just a kind of introduction.
So, here’s a more structured
one, in the limits of my writing skills, especially in English ^^
I have
tried to complete an “old” column about the different working system, but
avoiding some technic details.
As I said,
there are many different ways to trigger the taking of a picture. The trap can
be equipped with a contact sensor: it will trigger as soon as a wild animal
will touch it. Those sensors can have different features, so each one is
adapted to as specific situation. I have found a great description of the
different features on this website: http://philippe.berger2.free.fr/automatique/cours/cpt/les_capteurs.htm
and I am grateful to the person who wrote it.
“The extend of the
measure: it’s the difference between the smaller signal that can be spotted by
the sensor and the greater one.
Sensitivity: It’s
the smaller variation of a physical value (weight, heat) that can be detected.
The speed: It’s the time between the variation
of the physical value and the moment when the information is treated.”
Most of the time, the photographic
traps that I’ve seen have a contact sensor of 5V. It’s a kind of button that is
linked to the trap through a wire or by infrared. But, instead of a simple
button, we can imagine a “carpet”: more visible but with more surfaces to
trigger the trap. Furthermore, a simple button won’t be enough to target a
small animal (rabbit…). The weight of the animal isn’t enough to trigger the
trap.
As I said in the previous article,
the vibration sensor is a good alternative to the contact sensor, but I haven’t
enough information to develop this point, because they are pretty rare and I
personally never used one of them. The same applies for the photosensitive
sensor, and I don’t really think that any kind of photographic trap use it.
Finally, the motion detector. What I
have been able to see is that they use the infrared technology to trigger the
taking of picture or video as soon as a heat variation is detected. We speak
about heat even if in reality the infrared beam doesn’t really detect the heat.
In fact the link between infrared and heat is due to the thermal energy. The
infrared wavelength can highlights this thermal energy because they have a
similar frequency.
I take advantage of this article to offer a link towards the website of my
company. You can find there several types of photographic traps, one of which
is the Naturacam HD, which will be the object of an article to come: http://www.piege-photographique.fr
Sorry for
my bad english, I use to be fairly fluent but this article is full of specific
terms so that was pretty hard to translate it. Hope everyone will understand it
though!
~HWS~
