The epically irrelevant saga of Moultrie Panoramic-series 180i
I would like to think that I’ve always been pretty good with my hands. Might be wishful thinking on my part. I certainly do enjoy a lot of hands-on activities though, including music-making, origami, and pulling aluminum nails out of trees. Then again, Clayton just tried to toss me a pen and my attempt at catching it was less than dignified. Sometimes I am an enigma even to myself.
Conversely, I can sometimes be intimidated and baffled by heavily technological work. Back when I was helping out around my college’s geosciences department, I would sometimes favor physical tasks like organizing mineral collections and pass off more technical assignments like calibrating the dissolved oxygen meters to one of the other department assistants. All this is to say that when Katri walked into our LRCC workspace last week and said one of us would have to figure out how to set up the “snow cam” we use to track the advance of ice on the lake, I was having some mixed feelings about stepping up to bat. I figured it would be a good learning experience though, and took the initiative on this one.
Now, if any of you are familiar with the Moultrie Panoramic 180i Digital Game Camera, you’ll know that it is cutting edge game camera technology by 2016 standards. You may also know that outside of the digitized contents of the manual, this factoid is just about the only useful piece of information you can find while searching the internet for information on the device. There’s a youtube tutorial for just about everything right? Not for setting up a custom time-lapse image capture on a Moultrie Panoramic 180i Digital Game Camera there isn’t. Not that I was able to dig up at least.
At the risk of sounding like a complete idiot (if I haven’t already), the information in the manual wasn’t very much help either, but after an afternoon of trying and repeating several mistakes, I did finally stumble into the timelapse settings and was able to set up something in a desirable interval. I had successfully worked my way through the problem, and was feeling pretty darn good about it, which meant it was now the perfect time to discover a helpfully annotated copy of the manual, detailing the exact process I had spent several hours of my afternoon divining through trial and error, and which had been tacked up on the bulletin board in the very room where I had been wrestling with the camera, taunting me throughout my struggles. Stay humble, friends.
The Moultrie is now residing up above one of the windows in our great room, alongside another mounted camera, where it is pointed outwards, taking some test images of the cove before being deployed up on the Rattlesnake summit. I checked its memory card the other day while I was in the office and found a promising number of cove pictures in addition to an unfortunate quantity of images detailing the underside of my chin, probably taken while I was battling my way through the settings. I just needed to make a slight tweak to the timing interval and it should be set to go after a final check. This task is certainly a far cry from the most exciting or important thing I have done or will do during my service here at the SLA, but it was a good test of my abilities and a great distraction from other assignments (like writing this journal entry). Most importantly perhaps, working through the setup of that device was a little affirmation to myself that I can do projects that might be outside my usual areas of comfort or enjoyment and still be successful. If I can decode the secrets of a Moultrie Panoramic-series 180i, perhaps I will also be able to finally back up my computer to an external hard drive without losing every file on it and causing a statewide power outage in the process. The possibilities are endless.
Truth be told, I’ll be a little sad to not see the snow cam hanging around our the office anymore, not so much because of all the emotional labor I put into setting it up, but because I am now thoroughly invested in its relationship with the other camera, which I initially thought might be a nice friend to keep the snow cam company while it was taking test images. Now that I’ve seen the easy way Moultrie's locking cord drapes over the security cam’s body, however, I wonder if perhaps something more than friendship has blossomed between them…
Paul is a full-timer who joined the SLA this November. Paul received a degree in Geosciences from Skidmore College. Learn more about Paul here!