A common house martins couple started building their nest in an unfinished tool shack at the far end of my yard few days ago. I still don’t have a door or window on that building, so they can enter and leave freely. My kids are curious and keep peeking into the shack, sometimes scaring the little birds away. I decided to create camera so that the kids can observe without bothering them. I recently got a Raspberry Pi camera board and the plan was to create a website with pictures of the birds taken whenever motion occurs. I used these instructions to achieve this, pretty straight-forward. WiFi turned out to be a problem as my cheap dongle lacked the range, so I got a TL-WN722N High Gain Wireless USB Adapter, it works out of the box with the latest Wheezy image. I wanted these enclosed in a project box to prevent dusting, the camera will be inside the shack so no worries about water-proofing:
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- The Raspberry Pi and the WiFi dongle, the antenna is outside the box for improved reception.
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- Camera glued to outside of enclosure, didn’t want to drill the box just yet and it is inside the shack..
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- The box mounted opposite to the bird’s nest
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- First images..
It is very educational for the kids to watch the birds build their nest, few more pictures from today:
Stumbled upon this post by accident. I wanted to do something similar but with live video streaming and encountered severe performance problems on the pi. Since then I’m using a normal PC for it: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/amselnest1-2014/theater
Best regards
Leo