An attempt at making a cat collar camera

Overview

This is a small Raspberry Pi with a battery pack that I've tied to a cat collar.

It's fairly light but much too bukly. It's impossible to see anything when the cats move.

Video

Tech

The Pi saves video to its memory card, which I then transfer over to my desktop over wifi. The battery is strong enough to keep going for hours and hours.

• A Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W
• A Pi Camera
• An official Pi Zero case with the camera cover
• A 4,000 mAh battery pack
• Velcro straps or zip-ties to bind the setup on a cat collar.

Stabilizing video

I was curious to see whether stabilization could recover the overly shaky footage, but it turns out that it doesn't really. I think stabilization is better for removing slight shaking. This is too extreme.

This blog post explains how to use ffmpeg to stabilize a vide: https://www.paulirish.com/2021/video-stabilization-with-ffmpeg-and-vidstab/

Desoldering a Pi

I had been using my Pi Zero for my plants. I had to get rid of the GPIO pins so that the board can fit in the case.