Just on the patio - two badgers have just done a tour of the back garden.
At the same time a fox is sitting proudly on the drive with five cubs frolicking around.
Need to get one of those movement sensitive nature cams.
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Where roughly are you based. Is the house rural?
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>> Where roughly are you based. Is the house rural?
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Seaside town on the South East Coast. About a mile from the town centre. Certainly not rural, though the road is unmade and leads to a 104 acre wood (<5 minute walk). We also have a 20-30 x 130 meter "wood" in front of our house, between the drive and unmade road, that we own a share of with our neighbours.
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Missed the edit - un-adopted, not unmade.
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>> Need to get one of those movement sensitive nature cams.
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I bought this below for £52 plus some batteries and a memory card. The price is now around £60. Amazon are out of stock of that model, it seems. Does movies, stills or a comination. Just set it up in the garden and it's all automated. There was some advice about not being too ambitious with the memory card which I can't remember.
tinyurl.com/ydd78nsy
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It may not surprise you to know that I've built my own cameras using the cheapest Raspberry Pi board (except it's the one with WiFi).
The CEX shop have refurb Pi Zero W boards for £18 tinyurl.com/2ee3452d and refurb camera boards for £6 tinyurl.com/ynhm8ar2 (Blimey, they've both more than doubling in price since I got mine new!!)
A case from eBay for a few quid, and SD card and a couple of cables, install motioneyos ( project here - tinyurl.com/2dn4n6cb ) and away you go.
I've done two main things:
- I made one camera and mounted it and took a still with it every two minutes in daylight hours for over a year. When I get round to it I intend trying to assess which time is best across the year and select it to make a time lapse of my garden growing.
- I recorded 1 minute bursts triggered by motion, day and night, and captured foxes, hedgehogs, my now-departed cat and other creatures. That soft ware is quite neat as you can decide how much you want the view to change (i.e. how many pixels) to determine the trigger, and also you can mask areas of the pic to not be included in the trigger, so where I have a bush which waves in the wind I could just block it out.
I've done that with the camera in different places in the garden, powering it from an old car battery. I put an old plastic storage box on its side to put it all in to protect it from any rain or dew.
I can also take a pic of initiate a recording from my PC or phone on demand. It saves the files directly to my NAS so I only needed a small SD card.
The camera was my first Raspberry project and really quite satisfying. There are any number of how-to's on the internet, and it's really designed for kids so it is not hard to do, and requires no programming knowledge. The great thing is you can just take out the card and put it to one side so you can use the Pi for something else with a different SD card rather than destroying you work each time.
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Sounds fun, thanks for the write up. On the edge of my knowledge here, but am I right in thinking that if you used Docker you wouldn't have to swap SD cards about if you want to run another project on the same Pi?
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You're outside my knowledge now :-)
I *think* Docker is like a virtual server so you can run different apps independently of each other and with no potential for them to interfere with each other (except you're sharing resources like memory and processing which are finite), so you could conceivably do that. I looked at it to run my Home Assistant and the other bits I have running 24x7 (inbound VPN, capturing Octopus usage etc) but decided that that would be best on a dedicated machine.
I already had a number of Pi Zero's not doing anything so using one of them was ideal. The camera app doesn't take much resource for sure.
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Coming home from a quick shop Mrs Z had to stop the car just as she turned on to the drive as the cubs, confirmed to be 6 now, we’re playing on the drive.
Two neighbours popped out to say the family have been adopted!
They live under the decking one of the neighbours has “illegally” placed in our wood and she feeds them.
Another neighbour noticed the parent was showing signs of mange so is pacing her food with medicine obtained from a local vet!
Makes me smile!
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Nobody keeps chickens round your way then?
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>> Nobody keeps chickens round your way then?
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None of the houses on our drive as far as I know.
About half a dozen houses down a young couple with kids have done a fantastic job of converting the 1980s building to an ultra modern affair with a 360 degree, full height wrap around extension. It must have cost a fortune and looks great. They have a Tesla and BMW i3 and when I drive past there is always a chicken walking along the top of the fence. We don’t hear any cockerel, but we do hear woodpeckers.
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Two Badgers and Fox with Five Cubs - MD
