Bird webcam

It started about a year ago and I never got it running so I went back to it today and did a fresh install installing ffmpeg and motion as instructed by many other sites and blogs.

Sure enough it worked straight away which was good, god knows what I did wrong last time. 

Even through I can use the raspi cam that plugs into the csi on the motherboard, I really wanted to finish this project off and mark it as success.

So with a sweex national geographic hd usb webcam I was able to do this and with a generous lead can place this on our bird tree within and watch the birds close up.  It saves as jpeg pics but with details in my timelapse post with the raspi cam from the summer you can turn the pictures into an excellent timelapse video.

I also have a 8000mah usb battery pack that can charge three iPhones from flat that powers this. The 2amp usb socket is linked to the power in cable and the .2amp into the usb socket once I have set it up as I find occasionally it needs that extra .2 amps to stop it resetting itself.

The battery lasts over 12 hours and a 16gb card is more than adequate for the project. I'm yet to write a small python script that starts up motion on start up like I have done on my raspi cam project but this is early days.