The Ltl Acorn 5310wa, is a Trail-cam/Scouting camera/Game camera/Surveillance camera with night vision capability.

Ltl Acorn 5310wa

Designed for monitoring wildlife or security/surveillance it is reasonably weatherproof, and can run for up to 6 months without changing batteries. The case is coloured either camouflage green or black.

The Ltl Acorn 5310a has a 5 Megapixel camera (interpolated to 12Mp ²⁾), and two passive infrared sensors. One sensor (the 'prep' sensor) is lit by two lenses angled at 50º to either side. It is basically a Ltl-5210a with more infra-red LEDs for night illumination.

Described as a 12MP camera in advertising, yet it is also described as only having a 5MP sensor. The extra inserted pixels in the 4000 x 3000 images are interpolated (ie average of adjacent pixels) - ie literally a waste of space on your SD card just for marketing hype and actually a degradation of picture quality.

The original version has no microphone, but later revisions incorporate a mono microphone under a small hole to the right of the PIR sensors.

Opening the cover at the bottom reveals the battery compartment, external power socket, video out socket (NTSC), USB socket, SD card, and OFF/ON/TEST switch.

”Test” mode allows the changing of parameters, check of the sensor field of detection, and review of images stored.

For normal operation it is switched to the middle position : ”On”. It flashes red twelve times to confirm operation and to give you time to leave before the camera is armed and ready to take photographs.

The prep sensor wakes up the camera so that it is ready to trigger when movement is detected on the main sensor. This delay between the “prep” sensor being triggered, and the main sensor being ready is about 0.8 seconds. The idea being that the camera can stay in low power standby mode (400µA) for long periods and go to full power only when something to photograph is imminent.

It can be set to take a burst of photos or a video (or both) every time the PIR sensors detect motion.

In time-lapse mode it can take a burst of photos and/or a video at regular intervals, and it also takes PIR triggered images too if they occur (timing doesn't appear to be that precise, as when set for a 10 second interval, the delay between images varied from 8 to 9 seconds). You can set the PIR sensitivity to ”Off” if you don't want the additional movement triggered images.

There are also two start/stop timers so that the camera can be made to be only active during specified periods.

Setup mode starts up after a 2 second delay when the OFF/ON/TEST switch is switched from ”Off” to ”Test”. The Acorn colour logo displays and the camera live preview screen comes up. Overlaid on the live image are icons and text showing camera/video/camera+, 5M/12M, battery level, SD card number of files and total capacity. If there are no key-presses for 3 minutes, the camera powers off.

Blue menu background, firmware V1.0.026TA:

In this version of the firmware, if there is no SD card present the Acorn logo and sound appears, then the screen goes blank with no live screen or menu.

Green menu background, firmware V161027_53W:

In this revision of the firmware, if there is no SD card present a live screen appears with “No SD Card!” overlaid, menus are available.

The backplate is held on by 6 screws, and after releasing the PCB ribbon cable to the keypad, opens out to reveal the colour LCD and SD card socket:

The Off/On/Test switch (seen in the bottom right corner of the above photo) is a weak point in these cameras. When the contacts corrode it becomes unreliable, and results in a variety of symptoms. Most commonly it is evidenced by the camera being unable to be switched into ”Test” mode.

The screws, securing the backplate, screw into mounts through silicon washers to minimise moisture ingress :

The rear panel LCD is connected via a 40 pin flex cable, and mounted in a plastic carrier.

• ltl-acorn-ltl-5310_20manual.pdf

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