How I built a Raspberry Pi Birdhouse Camera
As a follow up project to the motion activated bird feeder camera that my dad and I built last year, we decided to build a birdhouse with a camera to observe birds nesting in our garden. Specifically, we would like to observe the common starling nesting.
As we did in our last project, my dad would build the birdhouse while I would provide the electronics as well as the software.
The camera at the bird feeding station was motion activated and uploaded still images to a website, which made sense as there are no birds at the feeder 99% of the time. This time I opted for a livestream, as I thought that when the birds are breeding, there would be something iteresting to see at all times.
Installed int the birdhouse there is a Raspberry Pi 3 with a NoIR Pi camera and 3 5mm infrared LEDs. The LEDs are powered via the 5V GPIO pin on the raspberry pi. The IR camera is necessary because the birdhouse would otherwise be too dark to see anything.
The video data is streamed from the Pi using mediamtx to my virtual private server (VPS) running another mediamtx instance, to make it available on the public interent. On the VPS I also have a simple python script running that looks for motion on the livestream and alerts me via Telegram message if such an event is detected. I also get a telegram message if, for whatever reason, the stream is no longer online.
Below you can find some of the first videos my system managed to capture. I must say, I am very impressed with the quality of the video.