Monitoring A Sick Bird Using The Raspberry Pi

sick-bird-monitoring-with-rpi

[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?

6 thoughts on “Monitoring A Sick Bird Using The Raspberry Pi

  1. If you have an outdated Android phone, you can install a software to use it as a webcam (and microphone).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)

  2. 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.

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