While I was trying to catch the previous mouse, there was another one that was proving a bit difficult to deal with using my current technology setup. This mouse would not stay under the trap for long enough, for me to be confidant that I would trigger the trap at the right time, because of the 5 second delay. Even when I managed to remove the 5 second delay, I was still a bit concerned about triggering the trap when the mouse was facing the wrong direction, so I decided to finally upgrade the trap to a version that was fully automatic. The other problem that I had with this mouse was that it would sometimes take many hours before it would go anywhere near the trap, so it would have been impractical for me to wait up to 8 hours for this mouse to show up, so that I could then manually trigger the trap, so it was obvious that an automatic solution would me needed, in order to handle any future mice that could be like this one. Because I was already using an Arduino, I decided to upgrade it with an infra red transmitter and receiver, which would then be able to detect when the mouse was in a certain part of the trap.
This particular mouse did not seem to like the peanut butter as much as the smarties chocolate, which you can see when it goes into the trap from the side which is nearer to the chocolate.
I am using a raspberry pi to capture the infra red video and I am using the raspberry pi ssh service to tunnel the video stream, from raspivid to my main pc. I am running a minimal Raspbian on the Raspberry pi and I am using an infra red camera that I bought from Ebay. The Trap is powered by an Arduino nano with nrf24l01 wireless radio, which can be used to trigger the trap remotely, but the remote trigger was not needed in this video. I am running the Arduino nano rf24 library on the microcontroller, to transfer the sensor data when I was first running it, while I was trying out the various ways to detect the mouse.