This is kind of a follow-up on my post about one of our bird houses becoming a ‘smart home’ last year… well it wasn’t really a smart home, just a bird box with a weather station on top of it. But it looked kind of cool and a pair of blue tits didn’t care about the whirling parts above them.
A this spring my kids and I decided to build a bird box with a built-in live camera. A real (hehe) smart home for birds.
We used an ESP32-Cam for the build – probably the fastest way to get our bird box working without too much soldering or programming (source: ESP32-Cam GitHub repository ). We also installed a 5 W solar panel on top of it and added a Waveshare solar power manager to keep the ESP32-Cam up and running over night. The whole build was pretty much pieced together and we still have to improve a few things in our design. But hey, it works (mostly).