There's something nice about feeding birds, that they learn where your feeder is and come back every so often for breakfast and dinner - a bit like a pet.
So far with my feeder I've seen Collared Doves, Wood Pigeons & Great Tits' 👀 I bought an ESP-32 Camera module a month or so ago & last weekend as a break from the agritech thing I've been tinkering with, figured it might be fun to set it up to stream the bird feeder to my website. After a few days of tinkering (90% with the 3d model) I have this;
It's quite simple currently, just a switch, antenna, TP4056 charger, 18650 cell & a boost converter, but open for extension with things like motion detection & notification pushing. For now it just streams, and just earlier I caught my first birds on it!
I have a RPi setup that proxies the MJPEG stream from the ESP to the internet - as well as providing a couple of routes for getting a timestamped snapshot. I need to add an MQTT broker into the mix at some point to provide a way to track signal strength & battery life.
https://gitlab.com/cxss/birdcam for code & schematics 🐦