Motion Activated Bird Camera

In order to see what birds visit our garden, my dad and I built an bird feeding station with a motion activated camera. My dad, who is a much better at wood working than me, built the feeding station itself, while I handled the software and the Raspberry Pi. You can find the latest images captured by the camera here!

The feeder is of a relatively simple design, it consists of a box with a angled plexi glas window that contains the seeds, as well as a box at the top that houses the Raspberry Pi. Power is supplied with a cable that runs from the house, internet connectivity is avaiblable via WiFi. We actually had to upgrade our router and get a repeater to get it working outside.

For this project I used a Raspberry Pi 3 with the camera module, which I had laying around. To capture the images I use Motion, which can be configured to either capture videos on images whenever motion is detected. I decided to capture only images, as this would use much less disk space. In order to easily see what birds have visited the feeder during the day, I setup cronjobs to automatically create timelapse videos from images. To see the latest images and videos that have been captured, I also built a simple web page, which you can find here.

Here are some of the images the camera has captured:

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