A couple of weeks ago, I was sitting on the back porch with my mom, and a robin flew into the hanging geranium. I didn’t think much of it right in the moment, but when I looked later, it was clearly not her first visit — there was a picture perfect nest in there, with three eggs! As Susan has been really enjoying a webcam documenting an eagle pair (Jackie and Shadow) I figured I could put something together with stuff I had around the house. The eagles had a pair of eggs earlier in the season, but one was cracked and the other was eaten by ravens (though it’s possible the parents knew it wasn’t viable). But they decided to try again, and had two more eggs which have hatched and the eaglets (Sandy and Luna) have recently officially fledged!
My first thought was to use a Raspberry Pi computer with their official camera module, since I have one sitting idle, and power it with a large USB power bank. But after doing some calculations, it seemed that it wouldn’t power it that long, and I’d be charging the battery daily, or swapping out power supplies, or something. And I wasn’t going to do that. Then I remembered that I had an ESP32-CAM module that a friend had given me, also sitting idle. So I started playing with that. I quickly discovered that the video was super laggy, even at low resolution, so I decided to go with an approach of taking still photos over time, and creating timelapse videos. I had the software done, and was ready to deploy, so I connected it to the USB power bank, and then discovered that the power draw (in sleep mode) was so low that the power bank thought nothing was connected, and it shut down the port. That led to a frantic series of experiments to try to raise the power draw enough to keep the port alive, and trying another power bank, but nothing was working.
That led to some frantic ordering of parts to put together a “dumb” 5V power supply powered by 2 18650 Li-Ion cells. And of course, by the time everything had arrived, the eggs had already hatched. So I had missed the most interesting event, which was discouraging. But I still put together the power supply (2 cells in a holder that combined them in series, a battery management module, a fuse, and a “buck” converter to take the varying voltage provided by the 2 cells and turn it into a reliable 5V. Everything in a waterproof box. Yesterday morning, Tyler and I (well, mostly Tyler) mounted the power supply and camera, and the documenting of the nest life began.
Photos from the camera get immediately uploaded to a Raspberry Pi inside the house, into an organized set of directories. I quickly (with help from ChatGPT’s Codex) put together a minimal web site showing the most recent photo. Then today, I got around to writing the code (again, with help from Codex) to take that collection of still images and combine them into a brief video.
And that’s where the project stands — every 5 minutes a new photo is posted, and once per hour (on the :30) the day’s timelapse is updated to include all the photos of the day thus far. You can find the website at https://nestcam.tastewar.com/ and follow along. Apparently, we should expect them to move out in a couple of weeks, before the end of the month for sure.
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