Charly's Birds

Charly's Column – Motion Detection

Article from Issue 236/2020
Author(s):

Charly ran a first-generation Rasp Pi for years in the birdhouse in his garden, but the Rasp Pi eventually fell foul of marauding wasps. Now Charly has replaced it with an RPi3 featuring a NoIR cam and motion detection.

After a swarm of wasps finished off the first-generation Raspberry Pi I had been using in a birdhouse in my garden for the past five years, I knew it was time for a replacement – after all, there have been some massive technical advances in the meantime.

Let's look at my hardware first, and I mean the birdhouse. For my purposes, it has to be one with two chambers: one for the technology, and the other for the birds. Carpentry workshops operated by the prisons in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, provide good quality birdhouses in several kinds of wood [1]. I chose the high-rise model in Figure 1, which has two chambers arranged one above the other.

Figure 1: A comfortable villa for birds: the two-story birdhouse in Charly's garden.

[...]

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