Hi folks,
I have a pressing need to be able to trigger my Nikon D7000 digital camera at a distance. Specifically:
I live in the "sticks," "boonies," whatever you want to call it, and my driveway is a quarter of a mile long, surrounded by fields on both sides. Adjoining my property across a fence from one of those fields is my neighbor, a cantankerous man who has nothing better to do with his time than try to make my life a living hell. I've tried to take the high road, to reach out to him, pleading with him to tell me how I have offended him to make him do the things he is doing, but to no avail. His shenanigans are rapidly escalating. His latest thing is dumping trash at the end of my driveway- it started out as just an empty Pepsi bottle, then progressed to some fast-food trash, then graduated to bags filled with waterlogged cigarettes in styrofoam cups, then to bags containing bug bombs and dead mice. and now it's maggoty trash bags and split-up pieces of old furniture. Every day upon returning from home, I am greeted by another "surprise," with my neighbor standing across the fence smiling like the Cheshire cat. I know it's him who is doing it, because once I was working in my garden and saw him throw garbage out of his truck as he passed by. But of course if I went to the cops it would be his word versus mine. I need evidence.
So I aim to catch him in the act, using the video feature of my Nikon digital camera in conjunction with a telephoto lens. (I'd thought about setting up a game camera, but there is no spot near the surveillance location which would allow a camera to be simultaneously undetected and close enough to trip the sensor). I plan to set up the camera inconspicuously on a tripod at the edge of my yard, pointing at the end of my driveway and with the telephoto zoomed to get a detailed view. This should work well. But the problem lies in how to trigger the camera to start the video capture. I suppose I could sit next to the camera all day long waiting for the guy to appear (and I may end up doing that), but I'd much rather have an automated mechanism in place to take care of that job. So I was thinking that maybe a LoRa-type solution would be the way to go: a tiny, inconspicuous Arduino/LoRa transmitter placed among the tall grass at the end of the driveway detects an IR presence, and sends a message to the LoRa receiver next to the camera, which causes an IR LED to send a signal to the digital camera to start the video capture.
Does anyone here have experience with LoRa, or with another approach that could accomplish similar results (small inconspicuous sensor transmits signal to a receiver a quarter-mile or more away, ultimately resulting in activation of a digital camera)? I am a C/C++ programmer and have done some small amount of Arduino programming (and quite a lot of Basic Stamp PBASIC programming in my day), but I have no experience with LoRa. I am looking for inexpensive, fairly easy-to-use technology to quickly implement a solution to my extremely annoying problem.