Development of a Hybrid Energy Management Solution for an Outdoor Trail Camera

This article describes the design of an energy management system for a stand-alone cellular-connected outdoor trail camera that can operate without a power grid connection for a long duration. The primary focus of the study is to increase the operational lifetime of the system while decreasing human interference and the demand for maintenance, thereby enhancing the user experience. This is achieved by actively hybridizing three different battery types and a charging circuit supplied by a solar photovoltaic (PV) panel to harvest additional energy. This article investigates different user types and energy requirements for a hunting application. Considering the heterogeneous energy demand and cost requirements of the different user types, the battery energy storage, and PV system size are flexibly adjusted to satisfy the demand of the different types of users. While the proposed energy management circuit comes with an incremental cost increase to the trail camera, it provides essential functionality that will sustain stand-alone operation for a total five years with at most eight maintenance visits, decreasing the maintenance demand of the camera considerably.