This summer, I’m monkeying about with a time-lapse camera pointed westward over the valley. The first camera was a simple Brinno on a stake at the corner of the Great Wall, and it worked ok, but some of our resident birds liked to sit atop it, often leading to a splatter of guano right in front of the lens. The administrative overhead with a Brinno is also a bit annoying: a calendar reminder would nudge me to swap SD cards and batteries every week or so; dropped frames created annoying issues when editing; the angle of view is a bit limiting. To combat all these issues, and after much research, I purchased a new Tikee unit recently that can recharge itself via a solar panel and has an extremely wide field of view to capture much more of the valley below. It also handles the image dump via wireless, meaning no more fussing with SD cards.
The initial experiment did yield one very interesting bit of footage: the lightning storms that occurred in the early morning hours of 8/16/20, which set off the massive wildfires here in the Bay Area. Here is the processed vid, now posted up on our YouTube channel.
The new camera is just about fully tested and configured, but I will see about making sure our wild birds don’t think it’s a great spot to sit–more on that project once I climb up onto the great room roof and get it mounted.