Royal Oaks Bird Cam Summary

 

 

 

In the interest in sharing how this camera is setup I have created this document. If you want to duplicate what we have done at Royal Oaks please feel free to do so, there is very little that is custom other than a couple server side scripts that I will outline. I can share these scripts if anyone has any interest, however it is self-serve. I have included links to external links where appropriate to steer interested folks in the right direction. Interested parties can email doug at pacifier.com with questions.

 

Bird House

The bird house that the camera is located in is located roughly 100 yards South East from the Club house at Royal Oaks, If you are standing on the first hole Ladies Tee you will see it in the natural area.

 

The bird house is a simple design bird house that is approximately 8” x 8” x 14”, the birdhouse camera is mounted in the dead space near the top of the bird house.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Camera

The camera used in the bird house is an infrared 24 LED camera, the one that we used does not have a specific brand name however it appears to be along the lines of what can be found from Foscam. There are several variations of this camera with several Chinese knock off’s on the market. It was necessary to use an infrared camera to maintain some level of light in the bird house.

One of the initial challenges was the distance and the wifi signal, the antenna that came on the camera was less than adequate to maintain a stable and continuous signal to the host access point. The stock antenna was replaced with a directional antenna to achieve a stable signal along with a short pigtail cable from the same vendor to connect to the camera.

The camera selected was chosen as it did not have an internal fan and essentially made no noise, the light output was minimal allowing for what was believed to be no disruption to the nesting birds. It does give off a minimal amount of heat in the bird house

The next challenge was to find a reasonable brightness and contrast setting for the camera, this took a fair amount of adjusting. In the camera we used the magic combination of numbers seemed to be 4/4 for both. What we discovered was that there were times of the day and light levels shining into the bird house that we simply could not master 100% for all the possible angles of the sun. Finally the last remaining item was to adjust the focus of the camera, the camera has a removable lens cover that essentially the entire metal cover unscrews, not the rear of the camera where the cables are located but the lens end. The actual lens can then be twisted in or out depending on your specific distance.

The camera has the ability to do a timed FTP to a remote host of the current image, this is setup to happen every 5 minutes to a web server. The images are named something along the lines of 00606F0003AC()_0_20100923065001_26290.jpg as they are uploaded to the remote web server.

 

Access Point

After installing the camera in the bird house and adding the external directional antenna the signal was still a bit lacking mainly due to the location of the onsite access points. While the WiFi coverage at Royal Oaks is fairly extensive it was never meant to cover much more then the clubhouse, patio and pool area. As a result it was necessary to add an outdoor access point that would not be constrained by walls, trees, etc. Fortunately Royal Oaks already has a somewhat extensive Mesh WiFi network in place on the building that would have a direct line of sight to the bird house with no restrictions year round.

 

Web Server

This is where it might get a bit techie, not too bad hopefully.

The website http://birdcam.royaloaks.net is hosted on a CentOS (linux) system, essentially out of the box. It has other purposes besides hosting this web site that are beyond the scope of this document. Two custom but fairly simply scripts were written.

The first was a perl script that runs every 5 minutes as a cron job to rename the aforementioned images with file names based on the date/time. Every hour these images are archived into a hashed directory tree based on Year, month and day. The cron runs in the summer months when we believe there might be a bird nesting.

The second is a php script that is actually index.php that will look for past images from previous months and years.

History

The Royal Oaks bird camera has gone through a few different iterations to arrive at the current configuration.

 

Version 1.0 – There was a wireless camera with a 2.4 Ghz transmitter. In the lounge of the clubhouse was a monitor with a corresponding 2.4Ghz receiver connected to the composite video. This worked most of the time with some occasional signal interruption.

Version 2.0 – This version was a new camera along with a wireless transmitter/receiver pair that were connected to a Linux system with a capture card. The signal was the subject of some interruption and interference regardless of where the receiver was located. Several different locations were attempted all of which were closely located near and above the turn snack bar.

Version 2.5 – This version of the camera was similar to the previous and was subject to interference as well but was connected to a Dazzle DVC-80 which will capture composite video and both left and right channels of audio. The Dazzle DVC-80 will connect to a PC via a USB port. The software used was YAWCAM which is a windows based application which will FTP the image at scheduled intervals. This version was still the subject of interference with distorted images occurring at random intervals.

Version 3.0 – This is the current implementation that is outlined above, following complaints with image quality and distortion we started looking for the wireless access point and Camera. Once these were located they replaced the existing solution once we had no birds nesting in the bird house (mid-August) There are a few challenges remaining however for the most part the solution appears solid. The biggest issue with the current solution is one of lighting, as the sun position changes it causes the image contrast to change sometimes drastically.