What's up boys, not sure about you but I've been waiting for somebody to release a "fishing game camera" aka motion activated underwater camera but no company has taken on the feat yet. The one company that is on the right path is SeeWeed cameras but they've been on preorder for at least a year and there isn't even any real footage of it in action on their site as of writing this. It'd be such a great tool to have. Even just the ability to see fish activity 24/7 seems like a gigantic learning experience I'd surely kill to have. Plus nothing would get you out fishing faster than seeing a 12 pound laker under your bobby when you aren't there.
Anyways, I was thinking about throwing together some sort of DIY open source project before the season starts. It'd be extremely barebones quick and dirty probably no motion activation system for the first version. It's definitely easier to jam it with more batteries than it is to perfect a motion activating system in such short time. Plus the cameras have to run in either scenario anyways so may as well just save all the pics.
I've got the basic tech and relative shape worked out already. Version one has three 120 degree cameras for full 360 viewing. It will have some sort of IR led light setup to run at night. Underwater camera cord is expensive so it's all self contained in a shoe sized enclosure similar to what's pictured above. Probably will use some thick braid as the lifeline to drop it down the hole or thin cable. Lastly, no video only pictures.
Really need your opinions to finalize the hardware.
A.) What kind of battery life do you think is acceptable? (4-5 days is roughly the max I planned on)
B.) Minimum time between pictures? I figure each camera can take one picture every 3 seconds on rotation and probably not miss a fish. Storage and battery life are the tradeoff with going faster.
C.) What photo quality if acceptable? 480p, 720p, 1080p. Storage is a limitation at 1080p in particular.
D.) Most importantly, what are your overall thoughts on the idea and why it hasn't been pursued? Any and all opinions will be noted for future versions.
Posted by ItbetheJosh
2 Comments
D) please lord no. Forgive my boomering here, but just no. Between livescopes and FFS and bathymetric LIDAR and improved fishfinders we’re already going crazy on tech. This comes to market and it’s going to be like some spots I’ve seen for hunting where people have cell cameras on every dang trail in a grid.
That said… If you’re going this route, I think the more killer tech would be a side scanning or vertical scanning short range sonar that let’s you exactly pattern fish size and activity in spot for days or weeks with wya better range than a camera?
A) doesn’t IR scatter almost instantly in water and then attenuate? Iirc it’s probably going to look like a pic of a blizzard at feet. Plus the IR lasers gonna freak out. As a tech problem I think you’d need a sonar based trigger to get it to reliably take pics on a meters/yard scale, let alone before you solve the illumination issue.
Final thought is that this is probably questionably legal in most states and how is it going to work in practice? You sink it on a stake with a marking balloon into public bottomlands? Can someone take it? Is it littering? What about in navigable channels? Idk, seems a recipe for conflict and that’s before the crazies start trying to pattern a lake with a line of these 10 yds apart straight across.Â
To be brutally honest dude, I think itâs totally pointless and a waste of time, effort and money, and I couldnât think a more gimmicky product. Fish simply do not behave like deer and to treat them like that is nothing short of foolish. Letâs say you did manage to iron out all the wrinkles it would take to make something like this actually function, Iâll be damned if I sit and waste my time hoping to catch a fish because I got a picture of it the day before on an underwater âtrail cameraâ fish are either there or they are not, go out and find them wether that be with FFS, a flasher or an aquavu, if they arenât there keep moving till you find them.