Night vision DIY

Well since paul planted the seed the other day about how i should use some night vision gear for my hunting i have been doing some research. There are a lot of options out there for doing it on a budget such as reversing cameras which already have IR built in, you can get these off trade me for under $100.00 with screen, but i want to pay less than that and i want to see how cheap i can go and still see what i am doing. I plan to use things i have around the house and dont plan on spending to much cash to experiment this with. Im going to set my budget at $40.00. Can this be done? who knows, but its going to be good finding out.

So this is my master plan. I plan to use my smart phone to hook up to a usb camera, I brought a OTG lead to plug into the phone from Jcar for 7 bucks and a universal phone bracket from the 2 dolla shop to hold the phone to the scope. The usb camera will be out of an old HP laptop which i plan to convert to run off a usb cable. I have my spotlight which i will convert to IR as well.


So first off i needed to strip the camera out of the laptop which was pretty easy only 4 screws to hold the plastic face plate on then the camera was only held on with double sided tape. I made sure i took the wires and plug out without damaging the plug or cable. next i got an old usb cable and cut the square plug off. removed the foil shielding from the exposed wires and stripped the wires so the copper was showing. Next i did the same with the wires from the camera. I used a multi meter to find the earth which in this case were the set of white wires. that left 3 wires a red one a yellow one and a green one. the red one was power and the other two connected to signal for the usb. Put it all together and i now have a working USB camera. I tested it on my PC and it gives out 640x480 @ 30fps not bad for free.

Next thing i had to do was test it to make sure it can see IR. to do this i just got the remote control for the TV and pushed the power button in front of the camera and looked to see if i could see the led light up and yes i can! so that a good start. I am not sure if these have a IR filter built in or not i wont know that till i have finished my IR torch and test it in the dark. if i cant see anything i will need to pull it apart and remove the filter.

Thats as far as i have got so more to follow shortly.

Well the camera from the laptop doesnt connect to my phone, works fine on the PC but the phone just doesnt pick it up so i will have to look for cheap camera form somewhere.

It just so happens i have an old security camera in storage. It has an board stile camera on it and i have removed the IR filter and played around with a mounting tube and my home made IR light. works good but the image is very small in the center of the screen and is very hard to see. ill post some photos of what i have done so far in the morning. ill try to track down a bigger lens for it and see if that helps the image size.

Awesome, I would love to add some night vision to mine.

That's the cleanest way of doing that. If I find a cheap handy cam I will do it also. I got to shoot some rats at the tip a couple of weeks ago with my n v gear.