Birdbox 2023 - Technical Blogpost

Birdbox 2023 stream done. See highlights!

I decided on building yet another birdbox, only slightly modifying the hardware of the 2021 one.

TLDR: I simply modified the software and added a Wifi antenna.

If you want to, feel free to watch this YouTube video I made about the topic: youtu.be/VMYSum1HH5c

So how’d we build this fella? Well, at first I tried connecting a Raspberry Pi Zero with a noir camera to an external WiFi antenna in a plastic bag and calling it a day, but the Zero wasn’t cutting it. I needed to run a Gunicorn Flask server and serve high res images afterall (more about this later). I wrote this simple python code, and this is what I run on the pi to this day.

Nginx Config: here Custom code: here

The hardware

I instead opted to run the Pi Zero 2 w, which may be a bit overpowered, but it felt right. Here’s a picture of the physical setup: The exterior of the birdbox

We used to have a 10 amp hour powerbank, but now we’re trippling that and mounting them externally for easier access. It lasts for about 4 days now.

In heinsight I could’ve simply used like an ESP-Cam behind NGINX and called in a day, but I wanted to do minimal modifications to the hardware, not to scare the birds.