![]() I mounted the camera using a 3D printed enclosure that I found (and had printed at my local library!) and double-sided tape to mount to one of the plastic housings of the bird feeder. Once I had the external antenna configured and tested on the MCU, I drilled a hole in the side of the bird feeder to feed the antenna cable through to the food storage area, where I was going to put the camera. I found that most boards have the on-board antenna as the default setting so you will have to do this if you intend to use an external antenna. But I got it done! I recommend you get a fine tip for your soldering iron and a magnifying glass to do this. The image above is magnified and those pads are tiny. With my rudimentary equipment (soldering iron with standard tip, no magnification) it was a PAIN to remove the resistor and put in the solder bridge between the two pads for the external antenna. Random Nerd Tutorials has a great tutorial on how to set up the external antenna that I followed. The ESP-32 Cam had a uFL connector already, so it's just plug and play, right? Well, not so much.turns out there are 2 settings for the antenna: the default on-board antenna (with 0 Ohm resistor) and the external antenna. Since I was going to put the bird feeder a good distance from my house, I figured I needed an external WiFi antenna for the MCU to boost the WiFi range. It's a pretty inexpensive microcontroller (~$10 with the USB adapter) but not a lot of memory (~520 kB) for image recognition models, However, it does have Wifi on it with the ESP32-S! I also had a ESP32 Cam lying around as well. I had a 1W solar panel, plus the solar charger, the Powerboost, and a 2500 mAh 3.7V battery lying around. Once her masterpiece was complete, I took over. You can see her finished product in the above photo. The project started with my 5 year old building, drawing on, and decorating the bird house. And with me being more and more comfortable with Edge Impulse, I figured I could add some image recognition as well! As usual, I ran into some hiccups, but overall I'm happy with how the project turned out. I figured I would give it a shot with a solar-powered version with a lower-powered MCU. I thought it would be a fun project to make a solar powered bird feeder camera so she could see the birds in her bird feeder! I've seen some image recognition bird feeder projects on here before, but they were with pretty hefty Raspberry Pi SBCs and hard-wired for power. The fun thing is that it captures scenes you would normally not see, like squabbles at the birdbath or birds feeding their babies.For Christmas, my daughter received a "Build your own Bird Feeder" from her grandfather. I have been using this camera for about a year now and absolutely love it. There is more information on their website. “Birdsy is still in the test phase, but will be launching very soon. The videos are stored in my Birdsy account, from which I can download and edit them, watch them, or share them,” explained the woman. “It works with AI and records videos when the AI identifies a bird or animal in the frame. To capture her photos, Lisa uses two setups – a homemade setup with an action camera inside a weatherproof box for closeups and a special camera made by a company called Birdsy. “There is a grackle, for example, that we named Count Drackula, which has white dots around the neck and looks especially grumpy,” joked Lisa. Nowadays the photographer can even recognize some of the birds by their markings. Lisa became increasingly fascinated by the birds that came to her backyard and eventually bird photography became her full-time hobby. “The reward is being able to share it with the world and seeing how others enjoy it as well, learn something, or are becoming more fascinated by nature.” #5 ![]() ![]() The creative process mainly consists of choosing the best photo out of thousands that my system takes each day and then editing it a bit,” said Lisa. “I enjoy seeing the beauty of the bird anatomy, the delicate patterns, the feathers, the colors, and of course their antics. She also tried experimenting with other ways of photographing the birds before realizing that to capture the birds in their natural habitat, she’d have to build her own feeder camera. Initially Lisa used a pocket camera before switching to a DSLR camera. The woman was amazed by the birds that landed in her backyard and wanted to share them with her family back in Germany, so she started feeding and taking pictures of them. ![]() In a recent interview with Bored Panda, Lisa said she got into photography back in 2012 after moving from Germany to Michigan. ![]()
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