[Jorge Rancé] was nursing a sick bird back to health. He found it on the street with a broken leg, which required a mini plaster cast for it to heal correctly. But felt bad when leaving the house for long periods. He grabbed some simple hardware and put his mind at easy by building an Internet connected bird monitoring system. It’s really just an excuse to play around with his Raspberry Pi, but who can blame him?
A webcam adds video monitoring using the Linux software called “motion” to stream the video. This is the same package we use with our cats when we travel; it provides a continuous live stream but can also save recordings whenever motion is detected. He added a USB temperature sensor and attached a water level sensor to the GPIO header. These are automatically harvested — along with a still image from the webcam — and tweeted once per hour using a bash script. He just needs to work out automatic food and water dispensing and he never needs to return home! Bird seed shouldn’t be any harder to dish out than fish food, right?
Maybe a mike+bandpass filter to check how many ~tweets~ a day?
[went to check on howto do that]
Man, there’re no adcs on rpi! Didn’t know that.. Forget it.
Thanks for posting it!
Awww, a Quaker, I have three.
These birds need attention, they are not like cats who couldnt care less if you are there. Even on vacation it is best to take and have them baby-sat.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfFv0_GFr7E
If you have an outdated Android phone, you can install a software to use it as a webcam (and microphone).
Maybe not as cool as a RPi, but people who upgrade their phones sometimes have them already available. (con: you need some hack to make GPIO for them)
Did think about it before starting the project… but to be honest with you, I wanted to have some fun with the RPi ;)
Unlike fish and dogs you don’t really need to meter the food and water to a parrot. They don’t tend to overeat or overdrink. You just have to provide a continuous supply.