My Naturewatch Camera Part 1: Getting Supplies & Getting Stumped
Recently my wonderful spouse bought us (me) a birdbath, with the idea that it would satisfy the final requirement for certifying our yard as a backyard refuge (it did!) and provide me with another avenue for bird-spying. After visitors failed to arrive within the first hour, I decided to take matters into my own hands and make a wildlife camera to monitor 24/7, instead of, you know, just waiting for the birds to find it.
A quick Google found plans for the My Naturewatch Camera, launched in 2018 as a joint project between the BBC and the University of London, with the aim of providing plans for a low-cost, DIY camera that anyone with an interest in tinkering could make using a Raspberry Pi board and components and some everyday items found around the house. Though funding has since wrapped up, the project was quite successful, with thousands of people making cameras and sharing their endlessly charming pics of their backyard wildlife. The website and forum are still up and are excellent resources to build your own.
I don’t have any experience with Raspberry Pis (I hadn’t even seen one in person until my parts came), but I am a relatively handy/stubborn person when it comes to fiddling with projects, so I figured I could get everything working with little difficulty.
Sidebar: as a member of the much-maligned ~Millennial~ generation, I have very little patience with hand-wringing about “kids these days” but I did see a tweet or an Instagram post or an Instagram post of a tweet recently talking about how electronics are rarely user-servicable now like they were in the 90’s and 2000s when I was a kid and I used to just crack open the family computer to toss in new RAM, and it hit me how grateful I am that I was able to do that back then. It also made me think about how I probably should have gone into computer science in college like my parents suggested instead of liberal arts, but that’s a reflection/regret for a different time!!
Anyway, back to the bird cam! I love to buy things so I ordered the necessary components based on the supplies list and waited eagerly for everything to come.
For reference, I got:
- Raspberry Pi Zero W (these seem to be going in and out of stock unpredictably, but pishop.us had them in when I ordered and shipped really quickly)
- A heatsink
- 32 GB micro-SD card
- Micro-SD card adaptor (I don’t have an SD card slot on my refurbished 2016 MacBook Pro — which is doing just fine by the way, thanks — , just USB-C ports, so I couldn’t use the normal card adaptor, but this little guy has worked great)
- USB A to MicroB cable
- Raspberry Pi Camera Module 3– 12 MP 120 degree wide angle
- Zero camera cable (the Zero requires a narrower cable, for which I am sure there is an actual technically correct term)
- Sugru (not totally necessary, but helpful for waterproofing and also I wanted to play with it)
The rest of the required supplies were things I already had or could find at home, such as a battery pack that was (very handy) promotional gift, a tupperware container, cardboard, tape, etc.
Initial setup was easy — I followed the instruction from the My Naturewatch website to flash the code to the SD card, swapped out the camera cable, and connected the camera to the board. Much was made about how fiddly the cables are, but my lady-hands are gentle (jk I actually have pretty big hands, but I was careful) and everything seems fine. I connected the board to the power supply and, while it takes a few minutes, was able to connect to the Zero W’s wi-fi. Magic! Fellow millennials and older nerds will know how wild it still feels when things like this just work…
Oops. Join me in Part 2 as I troubleshoot hardware and software I know nothing about.
What I’m doing in the meantime:
- Reading this absolutely heinous book I found in the free pile outside of my local bookstore. I thought it was going to be a campy, smutty 70s gay romp, but it’s actually wildly misogynistic and nary a queer in sight! Who would have guessed!
- In better book news, I just got Jennifer Fox’s Beginning Breadboarding in the mail, which will perhaps jolt (figuratively) me out of the weird summertime sadness I am experiencing. I also have the kit AdaFruit put together as a companion to the book, which contains many pleasingly arranged wires.
- Eating one spoonful of French toast ice cream each time I walk past the freezer.
