Arducam Wide Angle Day & Night Vision Camera for Raspberry Pi, Automatic IR-Cut Switching with IR LEDs for Pi 4, 3 B/3 B+, Pi Zero & W and Other Models

I purchased this camera to set up a monitor for some birds nesting on my back porch. I 3D printed a special housing mount for the camera and had to experiment with the dimensions of the holes in the mount because there was no dimensional information on the camera, sensors, and IR LEDs. Once I got the housing completed and the remote RPi camera fully assembled I was able to watch the birds raise their young both day and night. Side note, the camera comes with an 80-degree field of focus lens. If you want a narrow focus, you will need to obtain replacement 12M lenses from ArduCam and remove the IR filters on the lenses.

This camera module has a lot of functions packed in like IR cut filter and LED that can either be automatically switched on and off depending on the ambient light or switched on and off manually in software. But that is on paper and my unit has an issue with the LED -- the two LED lights stay on all the time even when I block the light sensor on each of them or try to turn them off in software. The IR cut filter turns on and off though.

The camera itself is very good and takes great day or nightvision pictures./ The picture quality is average and degrades a bit in night vision mode. You won't use this to film Youtube quality video, but it is great for capturing animal movements around your property at night.

I have had this in my greenhouse for a few weeks now. Picture quality was great, no issues, considering on buying another camera for a different place.UPDATEI did buy a second camera and am enjoying it as well. I modified a plastic container and moved one of the cameras outside. Works as expected.

Purchased for octoprint. Assembly was fairly straightforward but not the most stable structure. Constant clicking noise as the camera goes between IR mode and regular mode. Not sure if it's a defect unit.