Update 28/12/2016. Ok – I’ve finally got the live stream up and running. In the end, the woodwork took far longer than anything else. The bottom windows in each ‘house’ are openings for birds to get at the food. The bird-feeder has three compartments, which allows for different food types. Right now, it’s sunflower seed. I’ll post some pictures of the set-up in the coming week.
October 2nd, 2016. This page will carry a live video stream of the bird feeding station in my back garden in Galway city. I’m still working on the set-up – it will probably be Christmas 2016 before it’s up and working continuously. The stream is offline at present but you can see the previous stream in the video above. If you click on the 1hr 56 min point in the video above, you’ll see a blue tit munching its way through sunflower seeds.
The video streaming is handled by Youtube and the recording is made by the camera module that comes with a Raspberry Pi (Version 2) microcomputer. As you can see in the picture below, I’m using ethernet cable to send the stream – I have an outdoor electrical socket at the end of my garden, and I use a power line adapter to in plug the ethernet cable.
This is the prototype set-up. When I’m finished, the camera will be in a weatherproof housing, and obviously won’t have a big screen and keyboard attached. I also plan to build my own permanent bird-feeder that will be fixed into position (so that it won’t sway in the wind, and move outside the view of the camera). In the set-up above, I’m using Lego to fix the camera into position – the camera module is held in place by the pink and green pieces (the stones are to stop the wind blowing the whole thing off the table). I use Lego to figure out what the eventual camera housing will look like, but more importantly, it gives me an excuse to play with Lego.