808 Camera Hack Produces A Time-lapse Tic Tac Box

It’s not really conceived as a spy cam, but it could be. [Quinn Dunki] built this tiny time-lapse camera project with racing in mind. She’s involved in a group that endurance races clunkers, and part of the fun is sharing the experience of riding around in the old beaters. The module seen above takes a picture every four seconds and will last 24 hours before needing new batteries or an SD card change. We wonder if that’s longer than some of the ‘racecars’ make it?

She picked up an 808 camera, which looks like the key fob you use to unlock your car doors. They’re so cheap you can include them in projects and not really care if you don’t get them back. Inside it’s got a small lithium battery, the circuit board with a processor, microSD card slot, and of course the SSD used to capture the images. To control the device she used a tiny relay with an ATtiny13 used for the timing. We think the battery selection is a bit overboard, but maybe the next version will be a little more conservative.

There was one folly along the way. She wanted to attach this to the body of the car with a handful of magnets. But they don’t play nicely with the magnetic relays so that was out. The solution was to add that lanyard ring to the case which will allow the camera to be zip tied to the vehicle. So far there are no time-lapse movies available, but keep your eyes on our links posts and we’ll try to include one when it pops up.

9 thoughts on “808 Camera Hack Produces A Time-lapse Tic Tac Box

  1. Not to be a nitpicker, but I think you meant ccd instead of ssd there Mike.

    I love this idea, my friend is in the SCCA and I’ll have to confince him to put a few of these 360 around the car…

  2. I’ve always wanted to put a bump-sensitive 360 degree camera on my car, to catch any would be hit-and-run drivers. Of course, my cars are pieces of crap anyway, so it doesn’t really matter.

    The worst damage to either of my cars has been my wife driving them into stationary objects. :s

    1. The relay is more certain to work. A lot of devices nowadays use weird scanning for their switch arrays which is hard to fake out with transistors. You’d have to make sure the switch voltage is DC. With the relay, it works no matter how the switch scan is implemented.

      1. I setup an 808 camera plugged into a Picaxe to do some preliminary testing before eventually hardwiring a SMD Picaxe inside the camera.

        You’re right about the weird switch scanning, I found one switch would activate when pulled high and the other when pulled low, and one of them needed to be ‘detached’ through making the Picaxe pin input instead of output or else it wouldn’t work.

        I did get it working fine on the breadboard but lost interest in going the step furhter and implimenting the SMD Picaxe and the same dedicated lithium charger IC which is shown on the chucklohr.com site.

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