If you’re anything like me, you’ve wondered what happens in your garden while you’re not watching. I wanted to know when birds are most active – are they busier in the evening or early morning? Thanks to the latest technology, now with a couple of taps of my smartphone I can monitor the bird activity in my garden from anywhere in the world.
Traditionally, recording bird activity was a manual process and required many hours of constant nest watching. Springwatch has an army of story developers watching cameras and noting activity round the clock. I didn’t fancy hours watching a bird box so wondered if I could get a computer to do it for me.
Last February, a new tiny computer, the size of a credit card sized went on sale for £30. The quirkily named ‘Raspberry Pi’ computer was created to get more people interested in computers and I’d become aware of it through my work with the School of Computer Science at The University of Manchester. The Raspberry Pi computer’s diminutive dimensions and low cost meant it could be placed where computers had never been placed before – for me, that mean in a nest box.
The tiny Raspberry Pi computer records when birds enter and leave the nest box, together with information on the weather. This information is sent over the Internet so activity can be monitored from anywhere.
We’ve been monitoring a blue tit nest here at Ynys-Hir with the computer. The latest data is shown below. The orange bars show the number of visits per 1.3 hours, the red line shows temperature and the green line shows wind speed. I’m hoping to post more graphs later….
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.