Charly's Birds

Charly's Column – Motion Detection

Article from Issue 236/2020
Author(s):

Charly ran a first-generation Rasp Pi for years in the birdhouse in his garden, but the Rasp Pi eventually fell foul of marauding wasps. Now Charly has replaced it with an RPi3 featuring a NoIR cam and motion detection.

After a swarm of wasps finished off the first-generation Raspberry Pi I had been using in a birdhouse in my garden for the past five years, I knew it was time for a replacement – after all, there have been some massive technical advances in the meantime.

Let's look at my hardware first, and I mean the birdhouse. For my purposes, it has to be one with two chambers: one for the technology, and the other for the birds. Carpentry workshops operated by the prisons in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, provide good quality birdhouses in several kinds of wood [1]. I chose the high-rise model in Figure 1, which has two chambers arranged one above the other.

Figure 1: A comfortable villa for birds: the two-story birdhouse in Charly's garden.

[...]

Use Express-Checkout link below to read the full article (PDF).

Buy this article as PDF

Express-Checkout as PDF
Price $2.95
(incl. VAT)

Buy Linux Magazine

SINGLE ISSUES
Print Issues
Digital Issues
 
SUBSCRIPTIONS
Print Subs
Digisubs
 
TABLET & SMARTPHONE APPS
Get it on Google Play

US / Canada

Get it on Google Play

UK / Australia

Related content

  • Charly's Column

    Commercial surveillance systems are expensive and typically involve maintenance agreements. I thought there must be a low-budget alternative.

    more »
  • The sys admin's daily grind: traceroute

    Like every admin, Charly regularly uses the classic traceroute tool. If unfriendly digital natives interfere with an ICMP filter, he simply switches to a clever alternative like LFT.

    more »
  • The sys admin's daily grind – Yowsup

    Sys admin Charly likes to keep up with the state of his domestic strawberry plants, so he has outsmarted WhatsApp to allow status messages to be sent through the service from a PC or Raspberry Pi.

    more »
  • Enlightened libcoap

    Charly did a spot of shopping in a furniture store and came out with a smart lighting system that he has now automated with a Linux PC: Read on for further enlightenment.

    more »
  • Clever Tracker

    If you are a genuine admin, you will want to be able to google things at the command line. Charly uses googler for this; it has pretty useful capabilities despite the unimaginative name.

    more »
comments powered by Disqus