Camera recommendations...

Night vision. Availible light or extra Infra Red illumination? The ordinary Pi camera is not very sensitive and doesn't see as well as the huamn eye does in the dark. The NOIR (No Infra Red filter) version doesn' have the IR filter that the normal camera does, this does mean that you can use IR illumination(*) but daylight colours are messed up due to the IR.

You can get solenoid operated IR filters that you can place in front of the of a NOIR camera and switch the filter in/out IR ilumination on off, depending on the image from the camera. I don't think there is such a filter specifically for the Pi NOIR camera so it would need some jury rigging to fix in place.

The Pi cameras are "pin hole" so focus from about 6" to infinity.

(*) 850 nm, there will be a dulll red glow from the illuminator, you need to go to 960 nm for fully covert ilumination but the sensitivity of most camears at 960 nm is significantly less than that at 850 nm.

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Cheers 
Dave.

If you want night vision get the NOIR camera, and a powerful _external_ IR source, Pi powered one's aren't very powerful.

I tried the Bright Pi

and I'm pleased to see they published my review although it was negative.

In the end, I decided I needed true daytime colours rather than night vision capability, so I got an IR filter and glued it in to the mounting on the Pan/Tilt hat

which I can thoroughly recommend. For occasional use in a dark room, I added the NeoPixel strip, which gives bright full frame illumination (and with a little mod can run the Blinkt code).

---druck

On a sunny day (Sun, 25 Mar 2018 18:40:47 -0600) it happened Grant Taylor wrote in :

OK, first I only have old Pies, the one with 2 USB connectors, so I cannot speak for the 3, 3+, or even 3.141593. OTOH I have, and have tried, a lot of cameras with the Pi, but not the the orginal one that goes on that special connector. My experience is, with Logitech USB cameras on my Pies, that the USB is way to slow, useless. Using IP cameras is slightly better, but wait, cost versus performance, so I bought this:

it accepts a harddisk too, has 4 analog inputs for cameras (actually it runs Linux). IR is a vague statement, you can get from FLIR to things that need a lot of IR lighting, to this: Sony Super HAD starlight, note there are different versions of that board, check the specs.. 0.01 lux... Not only is that slightly sensitive in the IR, it can see if you can see, without additional light. So I have 3 of those on that recorder as security cameras running 24/7. As to the IR response, neighbor had a black dog, I see him coming home late at night with that camera, dogs looks white, where the muscles are, had been running, hot...

If you want real IR buy a FLIR. I am all for Pies, but some things are more specialized to do some things.

I'm using 8 Pi Zeros to run cameras: 4 USB cameras (Microsoft Life Cam Model 1393) and 4 using the NOIR 8Mp Raspberry Pi cam. (2 with IR LED illumination).

The USB cams are great even in low ambient light (I have a street light outside the house) and have auto focus. The IR illuminated Pi Cams are working well in enclosed dark spaces (nest boxes). The final 2 work well but go dark after dusk as they're not sensitive enough to run at low light levels.

3 of the Pi cams needed the focus adjusted as the objects are closer than 20cm.

Check them out on my website if you like. The feed is set to 30% to conserve bandwidth but the recorded images are full HD quality.

Cam 1 2 3 & 6 are usb Cam 4 5 7 8 are the Pi cams

The website is a bit slow but then the server is one of the very original Pi.

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nev 
getting the wrong stick end since 1953

Thank you for all of the recommendations.

I have ordered one of these cameras with a switchable integrated IR filter.

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Grant. . . . 
unix || die

B071NH4RDD/

Let us know how that works out for you. I have both V1 and V2 noir cameras, and I was able to find an IR filter and a visible filter.

Will do.

It may be a while before I follow up as I'm about to go on a couple of different trips. :-/

Are the filters you found physical that go over the lens?

I've also seen reference to software that can do some color correction.

- I need to learn more about this.

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Grant. . . . 
unix || die

They are both big honking filters - made for 'full size' cameras so I simply hold them in front, though it would not be too difficult to manufacture a holder for lens and camera. I believe they both came from Amazon.

I've got a UV IR Cut Filter 8mm Square X 1.1mm Thick (UVHM 080801-IRB3) from ebay, as it's a perfect size to for the gap in the camera mount that cam with the Pan Tilt hat, and I've now got it glued in to that with a dab of PVA adhesive.

If you get a different holder, check the size of the opening for the lens, and get a matching IR filter as they come in a variety of sizes. You may need to add a couple of nylon bolts as a stand off as some mounts look like lens protrudes slightly into the opening.

With the IR filter you don't need any colour correction, but for existing images you can use the gimp's range to tools.

If you've got lots of stills and videos which need correcting (as I did when I discovered a couple of hundred I'd taken at Barcelona Winter test

had the wrong white balance set), once you've found the right correction

curves, Linux's ImageMagic and ffmeg command line tools can be used to batch process stills and video respectively. After using exiftrans to regenerate the thumbnails in the jpeg's you'd never known they'd been corrected.

The processing was pretty quick on an i7 laptop with 32MB RAM, I suspect

it would take quite a bit longer on Raspberry Pi 3 with 1MB, but still do able. I'll have to give it a try on some of my pre-filtered images and post the correction curves.

---druck