Birdbox camera stream

[FunkyNige]

I've seen some people here like to keep an eye on the birds in their garden so I thought I'd share this stream of a camera that I set up in a box in my parents' garden -
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/s-and-d-birdbox
(noisy adverts, sorry)
At the moment there's a blue tit sitting on 8 eggs, we think she laid the first egg on the 20th which makes us think they should start hatching this weekend (last egg laid on the 28th then 10 days incubating).
There was a bumble bee snooping around just as they finished the nest but a quick peck saw that off

[FunkyNige]

Nimby said:

You can get composite-video cameras on eBay for around £6, which connect to most TVs. Ideally you want one that does both b/w using built-in infrared LEDs plus colour (though you don't really get enough daylight through the entrance hole for good colour), and a microphone so you can hear the chicks begging for food and later exercising their wings.

I have one, plus a composite-to-USB adapter but can't work out how to connect my nestbox camera to my RPi and stream the results. So just the rather murky fishtankcam at the moment: http://propolis.plus.com

Mine's the no-IR version of the Raspberry Pi camera and there's also an infra red LED in there (that's what the light circle is at the top of the screen), it is a shame that there isn't any audio from it but using the camera that connected straight to the Pi seemed the simplest option! The quality is much better on the screen too, but UStream won't let you stream in HD unless you pay...

[FunkyNige]

ModMan said:

It's been offline for a day or so now ... come on, I need to see chicks

I know I'll pop over tonight to see what's going on, hopefully there was just a power cut or it needs rebooting...

[FunkyNige]

Back streaming
Powercut knocked out some trip so had to press a button to get power back on in their summerhouse.
She's sleeping now so can't tell if anything has hatched, tempted to knock on the side of the box to get her to move Obviously joking, if it's one thing I've learnt from watching it it's that patience is needed...

[FunkyNige]

It's odd - I felt so proud that the birds I'd seen make the nest, etc. have had the eggs hatch! It's obviously all down to them (and the dad does seem to be involved a fair bit) but I like to take some of the credit regardless

Fingers crossed for the chicks now...

JoyDivision said:

Superb!

Wish I`d put a camera in our box as we have Blue Tits and they`ve just hatched.

You may need a new box - the cameras you get have quite a small field of vision so often the boxes they go in are a bit taller than most, think ours is about 40cm tall but the camera isn't right at the top. Next year it hopefully will be mounted a bit better so you can see the hole and the nest is a bit more in focus.

[FunkyNige]

SeeFive said:

Numbers seem to be dropping inside the box

On Friday there were six hungry beaks. Now there only seems to be three. Watching on Friday it seemed that there were larger and smaller chicks, and the parents seemed to be spending more time feeding the bigger ones. Maybe a little natural selection taking place. Still fascinating though, hope the little critters left make it ok.

Just 2 alive now Maybe it was the slightly colder and wetter weather in the past week that meant there just wasn't the food available.

[FunkyNige]

One of the chicks was looking out of the box yesterday, I'm not sure if the other one made it but one was bigger than the other so hopefully the bigger one made it.
I think it's just a dead chick in the box now

[FunkyNige]

Some Gump said:

Nige,
How easy / hard is it to set up the pi / noir combo?

I followed this guide
https://www.raspberrypi.org/learning/infrared-bird...
It goes into quite a bit of depth about IR light, etc. but it really wasn't that hard in the end once you've got used to working with the pi. There's a link at the bottom of how to stream it, which again was a lot of copying and pasting really! I never could get it to turn on and stream without any involvement mind.

Couple of things we'll be improving for next year (with the camera at least, I think the blue tits got unlucky with the weather in terms of how many chicks fledged) -
1) HDMI adaptor for the cable - using the ribbon is a PITA, especially if you use a case where you have to attach the ribbon then put the case on.
2) extend the wires for the LED, like the ribbon cable, it could be a pain to connect it all up in situ, would be easier connecting to a small connector instead
3) mount the camera a bit higher so you can see the hole - it's quite a tall box anyway but the pi camera has a fairly wide field of view so need to be mounted as high as possible (and be focussed properly, we didn't this time)

Tips
1) we made a little camera mount out of a Nintendo DS game box, but something to protect the board sounds a good idea
2) make sure you have power and a half decent wifi signal where the box is

I'll add more when I think of more...