A Project that Combines Tech & Nature? I’m in!

A Project that Combines Tech & Nature? I’m in!

I recently stumbled across a tweet from Pimoroni about the awesome My Naturewatch Camera project that allows you to build your own, cheap motion based nature camera which you can set up at your birdfeeder with little effort. I thought I’d document the mis/steps I took to get my own up and running.

The site contains excellant instructions that are pitched at the right level for both novices and comfortable hackers alike.

For my project, I originally planned to use an old soup and an old sauce plastic containers. I also don’t own a drill and so used an alternative technique of heating a Philips headed screwdriver for 10 to 15 seconds and pushing it firmly over the location of where you wanted to position your camera hole. The plastic will slowly melt enough for you to push it through and create the hole. You will need a sharp blade to trim away the plastic and possibly make the hole bigger if it is too small.

As I said, that is what I originally planned. After I attached the camera, I barely had enough space to fit the pi zero, let alone also fit in a battery! Doh! Measure twice, cut once as they say. So I switched to a lunch box. Both this and the soup idea were both fine for the dry weather we are having, but if the weather wasn’t as reliable or you had wet weather coming then I’d go for at least something that had a seal around the lid and the body of the container. I made do with some Gorilla tape instead as a warm weather make do.

The software that you install on the SD card seems to mainly consist of a web server that you connect to over the wireless network that the Pi creates. This webserver lets you start/stop the recording as well as adjusting the movement sensitivty that triggers a picture to be taken. You can also view the photos that were already taken, download them or else delete them.

I attached my camera to a fence post the first day and further up the tree the second day and was very impressed with the amount of feathered activity which we captured. The one thing that wasn’t great was the resolution. I don’t know if the lense on our camera was damaged, smudged or we were just at a incorrect distance. But it didn’t take any pleasure out of the project and hopefully you’ll enough it as much as I and my kids did.