I decided to build a bird feeder with a live-streaming camera for my significant other’s birthday. It seems to work pretty well! The system is based on a Raspberry Pi Zero W running the Motion firmware, with an image mask and motion trigger set to activate when birds land on the feeder. Every night, a shell script runs the imagemagick utility to convert all images with the same minute time stamp into fun little combined gifs. This project is a work in progress–automatic image tweeting and imgur uploads should be coming soon! In the meantime, if anyone needs an absolutely massive number of tiny bird gifs, I’m happy to share!
![](https://i.imgur.com/KrvUx9O.jpg)
![](https://johnmcnelly.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/2018-11-21_15-34-30_388-scaled.jpeg)
Parts List
- Raspberry Pi Zero W
- Raspberry Pi Camera v2 (don’t forget the adapter cable for the Pi Zero W! :/)
- Window Bird Feeder
- TP-Link Wifi Router with access to a DNS service