Don't be fooled by misleading sales information from our competitors!

1. Don't be fooled by a some board makers claims that you can build a trail camera into a "micro case". What they mean is you can build a system into a Pelican 1060 "micro case", but not a small case like the Pelican 1020. Their board won't fit into a case this small.

2. Don't be fooled by thinking that some competitive boards include a slave flash controller. This is nothing more that a gimmick! Their "slave flash feature" is just an electronic switch that will turn battery power on to a strobe flash board but not trigger it. If you want a trigger circuit you will need to spend about another $35.00 for that feature! Just something they left out...

3. Don't be fooled by claims of "easy to use" boards. Some competitors use DIP switches that you can't change easily unless you have a tool you carry into the woods. Any time you want to adjust how your control board works such as changing the PIR delays, or maybe changing your system to work only at night should be as easy as possible for the user and not require a tool!

4. Don't be fooled by purchasing a board that you can't swap out the camera controller chip. As you know different digital cameras come on to the market every day, and as you have come to expect PixController will always support any new and popular cameras. With our board all you need to do is swap out the camera controller chip and use your existing electronics. Our competitors do not have this option and will expect you to "cut their board out of your system" and send it back to them for re-programming! 

5. Don't be fooled by one our competitors calling themselves just a "hobby". This is just a way of getting out of customer support, not having a place of business and paying Federal Income Tax, not investing in R&D - "they copy that", not supporting new camera control - "they send you here", not supporting prior products, or ending the life span of a current product without warning. 

6. Don't be fooled by a company selling controller boards without having camera modification PDF files you can download from their site. Almost every competitive controller board on the market today will send their customers to our web site for this information. They don't "invest" the time into doing the work and research involved here. In other words they do not invest in their customers.

7. Don't be fooled! You get what you pay for!

Attention PixController Customers!
October 1, 2006

We have become aware of a PixController knock-off camera controller board sold under a different name by a company located in Wisconsin. This board is almost identical to our Original PixController board, and will be obvious if you see it marketed. This company has not only use many of the same electrical components, but the components are placed in the same locations as our boards. This company also uses the same type of push-pin connectors with the same cable orientation as the PixController boards for camera connections and power supply connections. Their controller powers up in the same manner with the solid red LED for the PIR warm up, automatically goes into the same type of walk-test mode, and blinks after walk-test mode.

Not only has this company copied much of the electrical design of our controller and software functional control, but they also copied the layout of our PixController LE DIP Switch sticker. It will be obvious when you see it because they stole our original slogan, "Powered by PixController", but added their company name.

Also to note this company did not purchase all of the digital cameras we have and figure out how to wire them for remote shuttering, but this company does support every camera we have released. We created PDF files on how to modify cameras for remote shutter and program the timing in for controlling these cameras with our PIC chips, and we post this in a pubic way for our customers to access. Here at PixController, Inc. we spend a lot of money, time and effort in looking for new cameras for our customers to interface. We asked this question to this company in question: "Why don't you have your own camera modification files on your web site? Do you send your customers to our site so they can get the information on how to wire them?". Their response was: "Yes, why would we recreate something that is already done?". They seem to have forgotten they recreated our controller that was already done. If our customers would like us to keep this information public you will need to send a clear message to this knock-off company. 

What this company did was acquire our boards/chip, connect them to a Digital Volt Meter (DVM), or Digital O-Scope and simply see what timing was needed for each camera. This data they collected was then easily programmed into their PIC chip. You will also note that this company does not support more complicated programming of camcorders through the LANC or J-LIP editing ports, or RS-232 control of certain digital cameras. Why wasn't this copied? Well, that takes much more skill than connecting a board to a DVM and reading the timings. You will not see this company support the more complicated protocol controls such as these.

In an attempt to take things further this company recently copied our exclusive Trail Mode™ feature PixController took many weeks developing and perfecting and added this feature to their product calling it "Rapid PIC Mode"

We at PixController, Inc. would like you to be aware of the amount of money/time we spend developing products for this market and to not purchase this knock-off version. This company only had to copy a successful product without investing R&D, testing, and market success when releasing this product.

Thank you,
The PixController Staff