Videos

Videos and Photos of past events in the garden

Photos

Photos of past events in the garden

Bird-box

data plots and design details

A short history

In days of yore when a smart-phone was a Nokia with a fancy case, I put a CCTV camera in a bird-box and used a video sender to get the picture to a TV in the house.

That was year one.

The next year I used an old PC that had a video capture card so that I could grab still photos and videos and using some free software called Yawcam I could save videos and photos.

Watching birds nest while they are actually nesting is fine but, and it's a big but, they only nest part of the year (for some reason they don't do time-share) so I started to put other CCTV cameras around the garden and fed them to the web PC via a remote controlled video selector.

About this time I began to play around with Raspberry Pi computers. By joining them to a camera modules and running some software called RPi Cam Web Interface, I created IP cameras that could be placed anywhere in the garden and view them on a PC. RPi Cam Web Interface will also detect movement and save videos and stills.

Over time there's been birdfeeder-cam, frog-cam, mouse-cam, snail-cam, badger-cam and recently fox-cam.

I've now replaced all the CCTV cameras with IP cameras and added lots more. Most of them consist of ZeroW or Model A+ Raspberry Pis with a camera module and a 12 volt to 5 volt buck converters housed in a 3D printed case.

To power the cameras I use 12 volt DC running around the garden. I've also put in a wifi access point.