"Steve B" wrote:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/deserttraveler/


I threw one together with the easiest to get to parts I had lying
around. I used a 20gallon trash bbl & 4" light PVC.

Set it up last night & got 2 squirrels today.

I had some trouble setting up the video camera to motion detection- so
after I got the first squirrel, I switched the camera to still
pictures and got a few of the second guy playing around. I also
watched him for 10 minutes or so- but never saw him 'get caught'.

What I saw, and what I have pictures of, is the squirrel on the
outside of the bbl, reaching over to clean up the peanut butter on the
pipe.

The inside of the pipe got cleaned up, so he must have gone in at some
point- but I didn't see it.

I've figured out the setting I missed for taking video on the motion
detection setting- so tomorrow I might get some video. [I'm using a
point-and-shoot Canon with the chdk hack- from chdk.org ]

Here are the stills of the setup-
http://i289.photobucket.com/albums/l...p/IMG_7269.jpg
http://i289.photobucket.com/albums/l...p/IMG_7270.jpg

I think when I dig that 55gallon bbl out I might just go with the
spinning can type dumper, but this was pretty simple to set up.

I used a can of beans on a string as weight to find the pivot point.
You can see the rubber band on the chain is stretched out in the one
picture. There might be a more elegant way of resetting, but the
chain & rubber band seems to work.

I should have set it up so the pivot point was at the edge of the
barrel, not 3-4inches into it. But it works-- so what am I
bitchin' about.

Jim