I predict that I will finally finish making that bird feeder camera that I've been wanting to make for my wife. I've got all the parts for it, I just need to figure out how to put them together and write some code to take a picture of a bird. Can't be too hard, right?
However, just FYI, this $25 2K cam (PCMag recommended) can do that sorta (it has motion/pet detection) and more. It also has excellent night vision.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CH45HPZT/
I was like, a $25 camera can't be this good. But I tried it out and it's actually really good.
A friend of mine just bought this for his mom, I thought it was really cool apparently it can recognize if the same bird comes multiple times and stuff like that
Yep, that's what inspired my project! My wife is a wildlife photographer, and taking pictures of the squirrels and birds at our feeders is what started her down that path. I had wanted to get her one of those feeders, but they're all subscription based and send the photos to their cloud/AI services. Like you said, I understand it. It's a really neat product for people who enjoy birding, but I want to try my hand at building something that can run off a Raspberry Pi and sync to my local NAS instead of a third-party cloud service.
- a feed tray that is self draining so that food never molds, a small amount of food can be cycled to avoid spreading disease
- users grow tired of fine screws for food fill, they're also easy to lose over time, threads get dirty with nature or food (latest purchase has a swivel joint lid)
Hmm - but you can't just have it take a picture of the bird!
It needs to alert you to the presence of the bird - what's the latest and best practice in notifications nowadays?
And ID the bird too - what's a good API for image based AI? Might be expensive, better run it locally, how do we set up a sever for that? No, not server, serverless!
What are the legal implications of running an AI based autonomous camera service outside in your locale? Better research that...
.... Yeah, I've ended up going down a lot of rabbit holes on my own little projects, but that's part of the fun I guess. ;)
> What are the legal implications of running an AI based autonomous camera service outside in your locale? Better research that...
Funnily enough, that's something I've put a little bit of thought into! I want to keep my bird camera local and "privacy friendly," with no photos leaving my network sans-human-intervention. I'm even going to paint a tiny little "Birds Under Surveillance" sign (or something like that) to indicate that the camera isn't watching people.
My goal is to have it sync photos to my NAS via some kind of wireless connection and then do species identification on own machine. It's been surprisingly hard to find any sort of open LLM or machine-learning models for identifying birds though, but maybe I'm just not looking in the right place. Luckily my wife is an avid birder and already knows all of our local species, so v1 doesn't need to identify what's pecking at the feeder.
Squirrels are fine too! We have the hardest time keeping them off our bird feeders – even though we have ones set out specifically for squirrels – but they at least look cute for the camera.
