Totally Wireless Bird House
by viilaamo.com
Introduction
DIY bird house project with Raspberry Pi and Arduino
Let's see how you can make a totally wireless surveillance style bird house. We show how to make a optimized 6V Solar Cell unit from standard 12V unit, solder your own charging control unit, charge your low cost 6V battery, capture images with USB webcamera, Raspberry Pi and upload images to free as charge to FREE FTP site.
The image on the left is taken from inside of the bird house with CSI camera connected to Raspberry Pi. After capturing the image a shell script will send it to the FTP site. We used the eu5.org ftp site to host the uploaded images.
About the hardware
All hardware was self made or modified from standard items. Solar panel was the cheapest available standard 15W 12V unit. We modified this unit to give 6 volts by cutting one lead and rewiring it.
The tall nest is running now with normal power charger but using Wi-Fi to send image data to network.
About the software
fswebcam was used to capture images in infinite loop from the usb camera.
The tall nest with CSI camera uses raspistill to capture images with a shell script.