Steve's Birdcam!

Introduction

I thought it might be interesting to see if I could rig up my Raspberry Pi with a webcam and a wi-fi dongle to look for wildlife visiting our bird table. Here it is! This was in a sub-urban/ semi-rural area on the edge of Colchester, Essex, UK. It is no longer active, but here are the best of the images I recorded. 

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How did I make the birdcam?

 

A few months ago I bought a raspberry pi. This is a cheap (£25) linux computer. Rather than have it sitting around I thought I would try and put it to some use. We get quite a lot of birds visit our garden and have a bird-table and bird-box. So I thought of a webcam, with motion detection, to watch them! I bought a webcam and a wi-fi dongle, a waterproof box, some garden lighting cable (for power extension), some cable glands and put them all together. 
For the programming, I used linux motion to do the photos and motion detection and ncftp to upload to the web. All of this is run from a bash shell script that I put together. And that's it! 

 


If you have any comments, or want any information, please send me an  email at steve@tijou.co.uk.


This page was last updated 14 December 2012.

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