How to make a Wildlife Camera (using a Raspberry Pi!) | Maddie Moate

hello and welcome back to my channel recently my parents moved house and their new garden is absolutely teeming with wildlife especially birds who have been loving these bird feeders honestly I've never seen anything like it we're having to refill them daily I want to get to know our new feathery neighbors a little bit better so I'm going to set up a wildlife camera it will take close-up photos of the birds on the feeders without me having to bother them the thing is I didn't have a void my camera so I've made one using an old food container a recycled bottle and one of these this is a Raspberry Pi a Raspberry Pi is a small simple computer that you can program at home to do a bunch of really cool computer stuff but I'm programming and turning it into a wildlife camera but how do you I turn this into one of these well if you want to make your own you're going to need the following things a Raspberry Pi zero w I got mine from a magazine starter kit and I'm going to use that bit of cardboard police - a standard camera module for Raspberry Pi zero I've got mine from a website called Pi Moroni a USB power banks along with a battery life's better with a micro USB cable a 16 gigabyte or greater micro SD card and you're going to need some kind of adapter so you can connect it to a computer or laptop a waterproof container like a food storage box you also could be smaller or larger than the one I'm using and a recycled plastic drinks bottle to use as a lens shield other bits you might find useful are a pair of scissors some masking tape blu-tack a string or cord of some kind and a drill of course always also growing up if you're gonna use something like this the exact instructions for the camera I'm making are down the description box below it's called my nature watch camera now you might have some of this stuff already but if you don't it shouldn't cost you more than 30 ish pounds in total let's get making and we're gonna kick things off with our SD card and the Raspberry Pi the Raspberry Pi is going to be the brain of our wildlife camera and we need to give it some instructions or a set of rules to follow so it knows what to do and for that we have to download some software from the internet we then take that software put it on this micro SD card and I will slide this into the Raspberry Pi but download it we had to go to the my nature watch dotnet website here you just follow the instructions and click on the software download link it's known as a disk image file it will start downloading on to your computer and it should take about an hour but in the meantime you can download an application called echar and that's going to let us take the newly downloaded software and put it onto our micro SD card when the software downloaded a slide your micro SD card using an adapter into the computer or laptop then open up sector and you have to select a disk image that's the software you've just downloaded and then you put it use a drive that's the micro SD card finally press and the copying will starts 15 minutes later and the software will have copied on to the cars and now you can put this carefully into the Raspberry Pi and we can move on to building the camera to finish up the electronics we need to connect the most important part and that is our camera you want to unclip the black locking strip away from the white camera connector and then you take the camera ribbon and then you slide it underneath the locking strip and into the camera connector there you go this is basically our camera but it's a bit flimsy so you want to grab a piece of cardboard and cut it roughly the same size as the food container you're going to use use the container as a stencil draw around it and then cut out your piece of card once you've done that you want to cut away one corner this is going to be the mounts for our cameras we can hold it in place securely carefully stick the Raspberry Pi to the card with a loop of tape or some sticky pads and then delicately fold the camera ribbon around the top of the card and use its own sticky pads to stick it down on the opposite side now we just need to give it some power get your USB battery and you want to connect it into the power the PWR port at the top of the Raspberry Pi that's this one just here and you should see a green light start flickering that's a good thing it means that the Raspberry Pi is booting up and not too long we should see the red light of the camera flash on Hey there we go perfect we've got it right oh gosh that sumed in hang on if we put this outside right now it would work as a wildlife camera but obviously it's not very weatherproof so if you want to you can do the next step and weatherproof it right so you want to put your camera inside the container and then using a pen pen pull need a pen one second you want to mark where the lens is on the box and just draw a little circle around it then you want to take the camel's back out again and put that to the side take the drill and I've put in a drill bit that's roughly the same size as the camera lens and I'm going to drill a hole in the container once you've got the hole you could stop there but I'm going to go one step further and make an lens cover squish the bottle down and then you just want to cut off the top at this point you can either stick the bottle over the hole directly or you can use the bottle lid drill another hole in it and then stick that to the container and then you have the self a detachable lens cover once you've attached the lens cover put the electronics inside and carefully line up the camera lens with the hole making sure nothing's in its way secure everything with a bit of tape put the lid on and here you go we've got what life camera but you might be wondering how do I turn it on how do I make it work how do we see those pictures well we need to get back to the laptop the software on the SD card has been designed so that it uses the Raspberry Pi own Wi-Fi network and this allows us to control and operate the camera through a web page on any phone or computer all you need to do when the Raspberry Pi is turned on you search in your Wi-Fi networks for my nature watch click on that and then the password to get in is badges and foxes once you're connected to the my nature watch Wi-Fi you want to open up the dedicated web page and that is camera doctor physical open that up and you will start to see a live feed so I've got my camera here now so if you want to start taking pictures you just click on a start image capture press that the button goes red and from now on if anything jumps in front of that lens it's going to trigger the camera and it will take a photo and you can also go to the image gallery but not focus a minute baby we don't want focus arena Dollface we want to get this outside now for the fun part we've got our camera it's turned on and down here I've just got my laptop set up so I can check that I am positioning the camera in the right place I think I'm going to start by popping it in the tree here pointing at this delightful bird feeder delicious it's not raining so I'm gonna take my lens cover off so it fits into this gap here in the tree now it's up there all I need to do is start things off on my laptop but the birds aren't going to come if we're outside so I'm gonna take all of this gear back in so the wildlife camera has been over by the peanuts for quite some time now so actually I'm going to move it over here to another tree and a different feeder this is full of Niger seeds and the whole two the feeder is little bit smaller so we should get different types of birds but I think I'm gonna have to secure it in place with a bit of court there we go that's better alright last place I'm going to put it is actually down here at the base of the tree because I've noticed quite a lot of the birdseed falls to the ground and there are different types of birds that prefer to feed down here I'm putting the lens cap back on just because it looks like it might right in it and we'll see who shows okay it's the end of the day it's getting a little bit too dark for the camera so I'm bringing it in and see what pictures we've got alright time to look through the gallery I'm going to open it up now Oh brilliant immediately I've got a great photo of a blue tit and I can tell it's a blue tip because it's got a blue on its wings tails and the cap of its head to crown this motive is - that's amazing Wow ok so this is slightly different it's kind of got a greenish wing yellow front oh it's black Cup and a white stripe and I'm pretty sure that's a marsh - it's this one I've only got a little sort of like called a picture of it but that is a colt it it's got a black head and it has like a white stripe running down here yeah my favorite we've got long tail tit and I love these guys because they just look a little bit scrappy and they get their name because they have long tails I also took some photos on the fat ball feeder that we've got there and maybe that's my favorite photo so far that is hilarious [Music] all right it looks like mr. mrs. duck came for a little waddle I've got a little photo series of them walking past which is brilliant so I'm sure they were cleaning up some of that birds see that was on the ground as I expect a different type of bird head is a goldfinch and this feeder is perfect for them because they have much pointy ER beaks so it means that they can get into those small holes and get to those little seeds more easily and I've got to look at that yeah beautiful just look at the pattern on their wings I've got having a bit of a 50 cops over here on them they're absolutely gorgeous they've got red heads and then a flash of yellow on their wings as well honestly I really recommend doing this if you love wildlife and you fancy having a go at doing some computer programming without having to learn any of the slightly more complicated computer language at first then this is great you just follow the instructions it couldn't be easier to do I hope you enjoyed this video I really enjoy making it and if you want me to have a go another Raspberry Pi project then just leave some suggestions down in the comments below stay curious and I'll see you soon [Music]

Channel: Maddie Moate

Views: 87,155

Keywords: how to make a wildlife camera, using a raspberry pi, maddie moate, how to, make, wildlife camera, raspberry pi, my naturewatch camera, naturewatch, wildlife, camera, camera trap, mynaturewatch, hidden camera, spy camera, trail camera, computer science, STEM, DIY, build, Make, do you know, maddie, moate, cbeebies, how is it made, birds, birdfeeders, goldsmiths

Id: IiOH5LUVkWo

Length: 12min 1sec (721 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 22 2019