Bluebird Nest Camera Construction Notes
Our first Bluebird nest box was store bought and served us (and the birds) well, but was never intended to accomodate a camera. I built a brand new box using a plan from the North American Bluebird Society and simply added about 10 inches to all of the height measurements. I also made it front opening instead of side opening for my own convenience.
Having read enough online to be satisfied that infra-red lights wouldn't bother the birds, I mounted 4 lights in the corners of a 1/8" Lexan window separating the camera from the nesting area of the box. The lights are wired in series with a 10 ohm resister and powered by an orphan 6 VDC 250 mAmp bluetooth headset charger. I could not be more pleased with how effective these lights are at illuminating the interior of the box. If I've not grossly overpowered them, these infra-red lamps should last in excess of 20,000 hours (well over 2 years).
For ease of maintenance, the camera is mounted to the door and swings out for cleaning and adjustment when the door is opened. For added convenience, the 24 VAC supply wire connects through a barrier strip with crimped on spade terminals.
The Lexan window is cut about 1/2" larger than the interior dimensions of the box. I routed a groove in all four sides for the window and it fits very nicely. Very early on, however, I discovered that the birds appeared put off by either their reflection in the window or possibly by the camera and wires visible through the window. In any case, I ended up removing the window, painting it black, and cutting a hole just large enough for the camera to peek through. It was immediately evident, from the bird's behavior that this was a good choice.
The 6 conductor wire and coaxial cable are buried in PVC pipe between the house and the bird box. The wire has 2 conductors for 24 VAC for the camera, 2 conductors for 6 VDC for the lights, and 2 reserved for a microphone (yet to be installed). The power brick for the camera came with it from the second hand store.
While I'm not prepared to offer a detailed tutorial on setting up a Linux web server and firewall, I will say that it took me several months of work and study to get the job done. The up side of this is that all of the software was absolutely FREE. The Smoothwall 3.0 firewall is running on a hand-me-down Dell Pentium III machine with about 360 Megabytes of RAM and a couple of extra LAN cards put in. The web server is running on a 900 Mhz Celeron machine with 500 Megabytes of RAM and a 20 Gigabyte hard drive that I got of eBay for $30. I supplamented the existing drive with a 30 Gigabyte drive that I had on the shelf for storing video captured by Zoneminder. I have since concluded this machine is just a tad underpowered for the task and am in the process of converting my old Pentium 4 desktop machine to server status.
About Zoneminder, it took me ages to get this installed properly on my Ubuntu linux server. The tutorials and help files that I found all seemed to be meant for different operating systems. It is equally likely, however, that I simply don't grasp some of the finer points of compiling linux source code and administering MySQL databases. Ultimately, the proof of my success is in the captured images and video presented here. I've been very pleased by my success and look forward to getting a better (COLOR!) camera for my Wood Duck box next year.
