Sunday, December 16, 2007

Live Birds Now

What is better than pictures of birds of a bird feeder? How about a live streaming feed of the action in real time?

I played around a little bit with an old webcam and a free software called Yawcam, and came up with something pretty cool. It only took me about 30 minutes to get everything up and running, which surprised me. I thought it would take hours!

To see the cam click on the link.

Tom's Backyard Bird Cam.

Also, I've scheduled to operate only during the day, it will be offline from 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. eastern standard time.

Tom

4 comments:

  1. will have to check this out during daylight house!

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  2. I'm at home on my lunchbreak now and the cam is pretty dead, but 9:30 seemed to be a hot time. Thousands of house sparrows and even a downy woodpecker. I also enjoyed watching the gray squirrel try to get out seed. Very interesting.

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  3. This looks like an interesting idea, and cheap too. Have to check it out....
    Being in the technology area myself, it is something which would interest me, although I'd probably try to hack in something like bird facial recognition - the default is never enough! :)

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  4. David,

    The software that I am using has a "motion detection" feature which looks pretty cool, but facial recognition would be very cool. Who would need a field guide? The camera could just tell you what birds come to your bird feeder!

    Merry Christmas,

    Tom

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