Has anyone ever made one? I know I have sen post's before but couldn't find them. What I am wondering is how do they perform versus store bought game cams in terms of overall life of the camera.

Here is the website that I found that sells the components.

Snapshot Sniper

Well for anyone that has read this post I have bought all of the supplies to make one myself. When I get done I will post pics.

Please do post your results. I looked at the web site and have been wondering if I could just build a good one instead of buying some of the junk that is around.

If you can get all your stuff together and finish it out, you will wind up with a MUCH better camera. Personally I use a variety of stock game cams, just because I have to run a lot of them. But if I was just managing my own place, I'd make a half dozen of them.

I just finished up my first homebrew and absolutely love it! I'm done with commercial cams for good. I got fed up with the poor performance, and most importantly, the terrible battery life. Think about it, you go through countless batteries each year on a camera which adds to the total cost of ownership. Say you spend $40 a year on batteries for a camera that cost $200. That's 20% of the cost of the camera. In 5 years, you doubled the cost of that camera.

With homebrews, if you use rechargeable AAs, you can go 7, 8 or 9 years without having to purchase new batteries. Plus, you don't have to swap out batteries but every 2,000-2,500 pictures if you use external setups.

For the cost of a crappy commercial cam ($200), you can have the equivalent of a $600-800 camera with 10x the battery life. It's a no brainer!

How much trouble are they to build and what level of electrical knowledge do you need?

Gus, you got any specifics on your build? What board did you use? What camera did you put in it? Did you go with IR?

My sons old boss uses cheap(pawn shop out dated cams) and avaliable boards,using lunch/mail boxes as case, and there really good,, puts everything to sleep until action starts,on his stills ,uses ( pawn shop) powershots.60 bucks and total around 100-120 complete,now in 4-5th year no failures so its a doable. few of pics from same, posted above,on board ..bright and detailed, better than stealth and many of other post,

I used a Sony S600 which has one of the best flashes out there. It's a 6 megapixel camera and takes fantastic pictures. I used a BF Outdoors kit that puts the camera in a Pelican 1040 case, with 2 sets of 2AA battery packs for external power. So, with 2 AA batteries in the camera, I get a total of 6 AA batteries run in parallel which gives me a lot of battery life.

Didn't go with IR, don't see a need for it.

As far as electrical know-how, you don't really need much. Of course, I got someone else to hack the camera for me because you need to know how to solder, which is a skill I don't possess. But, beyond that, you just have to be able to connect wires together. It's about the same as working with feeder and solar panel wires.

Gus, do you get instructions that are down on the stupid level>

Here are some I built.

Dave: there is a lot of information out on the web through some of the homebrew sites (Hag's House, ArcheryTalk, etc.) that walk you through each step along the way. And if you ever have any specific questions, you can PM guys who do this and everyone is really helpful and eager to assist.

Trust me, if I can do it, anyone can. The only thing I can't do is hack the camera, and there are plenty of guys out there that will do it for a small or no charge, if you just ship them the camera.

Okay, so I set out my first homebrew build this past weekend at my lease. The camera is a Sony S600 with a Bigfoot trailmaster board, and external batteries. I set the cam out for less than 24 hours and had 40 pictures, running on a 3 minute delay. With similar settings on my Moultrie, I average about 8-10 photos over the same time period. The flash is amazingly good and the clarity impeccable.

As for quality, judge for yourself.

Great pics.

I built one long ago. This from a time when most store bought ones used film cameras and the few digital ones were way to expensive for my budget. The store bought cameras now are at prices that if you figure in your time, it is cheaper in the long run to just buy one. Though the current kits available are probably much easier to build than when I did it.

I made use of every price cutting corner I could when I built this one. Discontinued clearanced railroad lantern batteries, cheap 2 meg olympus camera off ebay, surplus solar cells parts, old ammo box, etc. I used a separate flash fired by a slave off the cameras flash. Each battery was for a separate component of the trail camera and had its own pair of solar chargers. And with diods to keep them from draining the battery at night. With the camera on low resolution, a long delay between pictures, and a high capacity card this cam litterally would run on it's own for I know three months, and probably could have gone longer. Currently in need of a new battery system as the current ones have about run out of life and what I was using is no longer available. And I have one solar panel that apparently has had a soldered connection come loose as I no longer have power coming from it. But I will repair it one of these days and get it back out.




Using the separate flash I could really light up an area.



And I got nice pictures from it despite being a low resolution camera.



The only thing I did not have with the particular camera I was using was a date/time stamp, but that would not be difficult to have if one was building one now because almost all digital cameras now have that feature.

I'm still thinking about building one of these. How can I find someone around D/FW to hack a digital camera?

I send mine to a guy in Michigan. He will put a 5 wire servo so you can recharge your batteries.

How much can you build me one for???

Call or text me at 936-465-7022, frank...

Alright I am super interested in this as I love to tinker with and build stuff. Plus the crappy performance of my store bought cameras has really frustrated my this year.

been thinking about doing something like this for a spring project

That looks like something that may have been under roads in Iraq, and goes BOOM!!!!!
Just kidding, wish i could've figured that out before i bought my cam
Good Job

yea it does, one of the reasons I could not order them in theater