Box for the outdoor unit

Bought a plastic box today at one of my local retailers and turned it into a custom case for my outdoor unit. This version isn't waterproof (a quick google search told me it would take some more in-depth engineering than I wanted to do for my first version), but it is a great proof-of-concept.

I cut holes in the plastic using a dremel tool. Most of the holes were in a removable side panel, making things easy, though the hold for the camera was in the box top. I learned a few lessons: when I routed the hole for the battery charging cable, I didn't think of how I would mount the circuit board and connector to the side-panel. In the end I found a piece of wood that was the right thickness to fit between the box and circuit, and used to 8-32 bolts to hold everything in place. Definitely will need a better solution for a water-proof model, as these are 2 unnecessary holes in the case. The rest of the build was quite straightforward, and took around 3 hours. After the break are some more photos and details.

Once I sealed it up, and nothing worked, I realized that some sort of reset switch was necessary. I added a toggle switch and LED, which disconnected the power from the battery converter. This means that I will be able to tell when the unit is out of battery power, and have a method of hard-resetting both the wireless radio and camera. The final unit was tested and had no problem taking photos.

There are a few problems I can foresee already, one of which I think I can solve with software, but the other might require some hardware modifications. A power saving mode could go a long way to improving battery life, and at least the camera appears to have that capability (not sure yet about XBee). I am using an IR camera, which in retrospect was not a very good decision. In this box, the photocell that detects ambiant light is masked from the outside, and either needs to be exposed to the outside, or I should attach a fixed resistor instead, so that the camera thinks it is always daytime. Otherwise I am wasting power by keeping the IR LEDs on, which are also masked by the box and useless. I think the fact that the camera is imaging in IR (at least that is what I assume it is doing) is contributing to my poor image quality.