Yet Another Update on the eBirdseed.com Bird Cam
Sorry to keep harping on this subject, but it is a fascinating one, and has reaped some remarkable benefits even at this early stage of the project life. (The first night the cam was up, we caught a possum in our yard... I haven't seen one of those in a long time.)
Maybe this is a good time to discuss more of the technical minutia, but this time in reverse. (Figures...)
- Let's start with the matter of the end result.
Now that's not bad. (My "Print Screen" was blurred by the creature's rapid movement.) As for the gray scale, I was hoping for more color, but I can live with it. I'll need to fuss with the focus, but even at this preliminary stage, I can tell that I'm looking at a female downy. I got to watch her eat and fly... Very cool for a simple guy. Back when I spent a decade in a cubicle, that sort of real-time imagery from my very own back yard would have been very comforting indeed. If you want a better picture quality, the hardware is out there, but it leaps out of the $100 - $200 range fast.
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Backing away from the lens, right now I've simply got the cam on a tripod, and that no doubt ain't making the birds happy happy joy joy.
I guess my long-term goal is to take out one of the trees in the background of the picture on the left, cut it to about six feet in length, and mount it on a plywood base. I could use that as a sort of natural, non-threatening, portable camera stand.
- Moving even further back in this scheme was the issue of port forwarding. I spoke to that briefly in the last post, but here is a bit more detail... In order to stream a video signal onto the Web, you have to offer up that signal to a dedicated service (we use CamStreams) and of course that service needs to know where the signal is coming from. As our vid was coming through a router which keeps track of our network gadgets (the geek phrase is "IP addresses"), we had to find some way to uniformly hand over our signal to CamStreams. That uniform hand off is known as port forwarding and basically lets our camera "yell" at CamStreams in just the perfect way so that CamStreams can relate.
- Unraveling the plan yet more... If you choose to go the route of an analog camera (which I did), how do you make it create a digital signal that a computer can understand in the first place? Well, you buy a thing-a-ma-bob that does the conversion. But you have to be careful to buy the right thing-a-ma-bob for your camera. (USB cams basically have the converter thing-a-ma-bob built right in. The problem with USB devices is that they suffer from a very limited cable range - something on the order of 20'. Our analog camera will handle up to 1,000', which leads us to the great summary.)
I'll be honest... This is not the easiest of projects, even with a USB cam (let alone my analog rig). It takes time, research, lots of notes, and the expectation that there will be hurdles. (I didn't mention static IP, fussy AV, or firewall exceptions to name just a few.) But if you're the kind of technically-adequate person who can set a goal, and then move towards that goal in a systematic fashion, this is completely "doable".
Maybe see you by the feeders Cecil B...
CapeCodAlan
Cornell Ornithology Laboratory: Inside Birding
Cornell Ornithology Laboratory: All About Birding
