I've been exploring making a camera trap to put out in my woods, to see if I can get a good photo of the very illusive bobcats we've got around here. I went out to California last month on a photo tour to get some nice shots of less skittish cats, and it gave me the motivation to continue my build of the camera trap. I just today received the custom little PCB I designed to read an IR sensor and have an STM32G convert it to focus and shutter release signals for the camera. I built the board up this morning and am getting ready to fire it up with my J-Link debugger probe attached and start the work on the firmware.
Not to discourage you from building this, that sounds like fun, but I found a very cheap trail camera on Amazon is pretty great for this type of thing.