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Battery, no WiFi, 12+ hour recording camera? (suspected insomniac horse)

Oh no, I’m so sorry to hear that. :cry:

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The trail cam is a good way to go. I know it’s not quite all you wanted, but hopefully it’ll give you a solid look & tell you what you need to know. Do you have a spot to install that sees sun a good portion of the day? Being able to recharge via solar is a nice perk. Game cams eat aa batteries otherwise!

Sending video up to the cloud takes pretty solid data service. If you don’t have good 4G/5G coverage, it’s not likely you’ll be happy with a cloud based service.

  1. Trail cam. Not all are motion detection triggered, but can be programmed take pictures as close together as 1 frame per second (FPS). This is about as close to continuous video as a trail cam will do, but it may show you what you need to know with an all night series of still images.

  2. Dash cam. It would require a small 12 volt battery to operate, not a full size car battery. With the right size SIM card you can get continuous video recording all night long, and put the card in your computer to view it.

Wow, this is a really interesting idea! Can you link the pieces you’d need to set this up? I’d love to understand how this would work, and cost.

It wouldn’t. Dash cams record over themselves when the memory card fills. This happens shockingly fast, within a few hours. The thought being that if you are in an accident or an altercation, you stop the dash cam in order to preserve the footage.

Not only that, they still require power - mine is hard-wired into my 12V car system. It runs for ohh… 10 seconds without it. A 9V wouldn’t power it long.

This Reddit thread talks about using a battery pack to power a dash cam overnight:

And you can get sd cards up to a terabyte, surely that’s enough storage.

I don’t see it being inexpensive, but it does seem possible. :thinking:

I am going up to the 50,000 foot level.

Is there any data that shows horses NEED recumbent sleep? I was under the impression that they did fine with “sleeping standing up”. Or is that an outdated old wives tale?

Yeah, they do need to lie down to achieve REM.

Christ, I didn’t realize they made micros that big now. You’re right!

With a battery pack, it might be possible!

180.00 for a terabyte card seems a bit cost prohibitive, imho for a one time use, plus the cost of the dash cam. Unless your going to install it in your car afterwards.

According to this, a 64 gb card can record over 24 hours at 720p:

https://support.garmin.com/en-US/?faq=85FGsedVux25MrQ3gteSL6

A 128 gb micro sd is twenty bucks which more than covers overnight, recording at good quality.

Dash cams can be had for less than $100.

A battery pack can also be had for sub-$100 and useful for charging anything USB.

So for not that far off the game cam/solar panel linked above, you could get continuous record & have a battery pack that’s useful for travel. I’m really surprised! That’s a pretty cool solution!

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In a way the stall recording would be free, if you re-purposed the equipment when you’re done. The battery pack could be re-purposed as an emergency starter for your car or truck, the dash cam and memory card could be installed in your vehicle.

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Me too, this is neat. I’m tempted to try it, just so I can watch what my Old Man does overnight that shoves all of his shavings against the walls of the stall, leaving him to sleep on bare mats…

If you do, please post! I’d love to hear about it! :grin:

Update: the dashcam/SD card/battery setup is working really well, despite the fact that due to various errors I have yet to get good video of the 3am-7am time frame that seems to be of greatest interest. I’m carrying on largely out of curiosity at this point, as I have found him covered in shavings the last few mornings and think he’s starting to sleep in his current living situation.

@LCDR, you are a genius!

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