Dads new Owl box is up and we put in a wee camera to watch them. Unfortunately he used a reversing camera which gives us 2 problems:
- There are reversing wheel guidelines hard coded into the camera (lol); and
- The stream can only be watched on the tiny little ‘in car’ monitor, within 10m of the box!
The Plan
To set up a web page where we can stream the owls to anyone who’s interested, from the comfort of not-the-shed!
Opted for an old Raspberry Pi 3B to host the site. As the owls are already moved in, for now the camera will have to stay. That means hijacking the analog video stream with a video capture card. This has proved to be a real bottleneck for the project.
As the capture card has to be within range of the camera, and the pi has to be on the wifi, the only place that just barely recieves signal from both is right in the back corner of the shed. so there it shall live, for now. After getting a waterproof bax and mounting it to the shed, rigging up the capture card, it was all software from there.
The Result
The website is live! the stream is both weak (due to the distance from the owl box) and laggy (due to the limited compute in both the capture card and the rpi), but its the best we got for now!
In the future, once the owls are out, we will replace the camera with a wired one which wont be subject to any of the same pains. But for now, we can watch the owls for 5 minutes from anywhere in the world at OwlTube.co.uk