I’m after a new project and quite fancy building a camera/ recording set up to photographically ‘capture’ any wildlife that takes a fancy to visiting my garden.

I’ve got a few old phones and cameras that I could use, and can wield a soldering iron with confidence.

I’d prefer to build a self-contained remote unit that also works at night.

Any ideas?

I’ve not done any of those things, but I did use a old android phone for a timelapse project, one photo every 60 seconds, for about 15 months, and learnt a few things:

1) modern phone screens will burn the image into the pixels, after a month or two
2) phones and their software are not very reliable, uptime is poor, remote connectivity software (ssh servers) required rebooting regularly, apps freeze and crash when you dont want them to.
3) The phone battery got trashed in the process, we had ours powered the whole time.
4) notifications, system messages, sms, etc, can steal focus from your app, so remember to disable them.

I guess you could use a bluetooth trigger to take the pic if in range. Alternatively find/write a simple app to take a pic when triggered over wifi. Not really sure what there is you could solder unless you took the phone apart, which I really haven’t a clue about!

I’m not sure a phone is the best thing to start with. It’ll be a pain to modify and the camera won’t be great, especially in low light. If you have an old proper camera then adding some kind of trigger to that might be an option. I’d use an arduino and pir, that will be cheap and reliable. Fun thing to play with if you like that sort of thing. You could probably do something similar with a pi. That would give you the option to network it as well.

There is already apps on the play store that will do this with an android handset. You need to keep it on charge though.