Making Of: The Birdhouse Monitor

A behind-the-scenes look at the creation of Vögeli 🐣.
Since we noticed a lot of birds building their nests inside the housing of the shutters for our office windows, we thought we would approach this in a scientific way: conduct some behavior studies. We thus built a comfortable bird hotel with Orwell-esque surveillance.

Hardware Setup
Camera, motion sensor and temperature/humidity sensor inside of the birdhouse.

We started by assembling the Raspberry Pi, camera, and motion sensors inside the birdhouse.

Raspberry Pi
Electronics

A Raspberry Pi 3 is controlling the birdhouse and is located on the roof. We coded the backend using Django and fine-tuned the GPIO motion detection with Python. The software can be found on Github

Testing in Nature
Complete Assembly

Everything was then assembled and is ready to be mounted outside.

Testing in Nature
Mounting Outside

The Birdhouse was then mounted outside with space-grade zip-ties. Power and LAN are passed through thin cables from the office.

Testing in Nature
Birdhouse

The birdhouse is shining in all its glory and ready for check in!