About beaks.live
All this has been hand made and is self hosted. No adverts, tracking cookies or anything nasty. This is my way of fighting against the enshittification of everything. Enjoy the site. Enjoy the birds. I hope it makes you happy. At some point I am aiming to start producing smart boxes for anyone who wants one, and I will be doing a blog post about the design when I get the time, in case anyone wants to make their own.
The story so far...
About eight years ago I was trying out a few cheap cameras to attach to my bicycle. One was a tiny little cube thing that was a bit rubbish, and I ended up using a different one. The cube was slowly buried under junk until I had a tidy up and found it again. I was putting a bird box up, so I stuffed the cube in the roof using a bit of bent metal to hold it in place and a lens to focus it. The excitement of being able to see inside the box soon disappeared when it became obvious that no birds were going to make their nest there, and I forgot about it for 6 years.
Then, in the spring of 2022, something small and feathery was spotted leaving the nest box. I plugged the camera into a Raspberry Pi to set up a quick video stream. The excitement of being able to see inside the box soon disappeared when it became obvious that the camera didn't work any more.
Not being the sort of person to want to spend any more money than absolutely necessary, I decided to see how cheaply I could make a bird box cam. £10.83 is the answer, if you can't be bothered to click that link. I couldn't quite believe that any other birds would ever use the nest box, so there didn't seem much point making it any good.
Just in case there was anything to watch, I set up a web site. This is what it looked like originally, and to be frank it's not that much better now. When birds actually started using the box I regretted skimping on the camera so badly. The quality is terrible.
So this is where we were in 2023 - a bird box that birds actually seem to like but only a terrible cheap camera to watch them with. Big upgrades were planned for 2024 - better quality cameras, another box and more!
The big 2024 upgrade!
In October 2023 I fell off a motorbike, broke my kneecap and wrist, and the upgrade didn't happen. It was shitty grainy video for another year
The big 2025 upgrade!
About 50% bigger, and cunningly designed to view the beaks from a slight angle, the new box also has two cameras - one for quality video and the second for low-light conditions. No more grainy rubbish!
As well as two cameras, there are also infra-red LEDs and white LEDs, both dimmable for subtle lighting effects or a disco. Unfortunately the power-over-ethernet power supply didn't suit the white LEDs, causing the brightness to wibble up and down. The result is that when the light levels drop it has to switch to the IR camera instead of having subtle mood lighting with white light and a normal camera. You might notice that there is also a microphone in there, for the full invasion of privacy.
The technology doesn't finish there. There is a sensor on the entrance to detect when the birds come and go and a hot tub where the birds can have a nice relaxing soak. Well, maybe next year for that last one.
One feature that the box is missing which would be useful is a light meter, to allow the software to adjust the exposure of the cameras and to tell when to change to IR. The solution was to make a 3d printed box with a light sensor in it and the stupidest A/D ever, plugged into another Raspberry Pi for an exposure server. As with all critical infrastructure, it's held together with sellotape and stuck on the window with blu-tack.
Contact
If you would like to know more, want to say hello, or come up with a better name than the horribly outdated "Smart Box", email me at a@ qop.pm. I'm on Mastodon and I have a blog here if you want to know more about British pipe threads or setting up a web server using Bash to redirect Wifi logons.