{"id":7202,"date":"2018-06-12T16:22:28","date_gmt":"2018-06-12T15:22:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnjohnston.info\/blog\/?p=7202"},"modified":"2023-01-05T22:37:13","modified_gmt":"2023-01-05T22:37:13","slug":"naturewatch-camera-in-the-class-1st-try","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnjohnston.info\/blog\/naturewatch-camera-in-the-class-1st-try\/","title":{"rendered":"Naturewatch Camera in the class 1st Try"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was watching spring watch out of the corner of my eye as I did some prep last night. There was an article about making your own Wildlife cam. It looks a lot simpler than others I’ve seen and used a Raspberry Pi Zero. The BBC site had a link to My Naturewatch<\/a> where you can get instructions.<\/p>\n

This looked like something my class would enjoy using. My zero is busy taking gifs of the clouds (>70000 to date\u00a0Gif Cam<\/a>), so I decided to try to use a Raspberry PI 3 instead.<\/p>\n

The instructions were really good, simple and worked first time! No<\/strong> soldering involved. You don’t need a monitor for the PI or any logging on through ssh in the terminal. All you need is a PI, a camera module for the PI and a power supply. I used a \u00a32.99 phone charger. You need a plastic box and an old plastic bottle too. This is bargain basement stuff.
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The way it works is the then the pi starts up it becomes a network. You connect to this with a computer or other device. You are then on that network and not the Internet. I forgot about this when showing the class and couldn’t project from an iPad;-) You then open a browser and connect to a local website on the PI. There you can start the camera and view or download the pictures.<\/p>\n

Once the camera is started it takes a photo every time something moves in front of it.
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It was raining fairly heavily this morning so we waited till about 10:15 before putting the camera out on the playground with a handful of peanuts in front of it. After 15 minutes we collected it and had a look at the photos. I am impressed. We need to think a bit about placing the camera, perhaps finding somewhere with smaller birds but the camera worked a treat.<\/p>\n

I think this is a really useful tool for the classroom. I hope we can use it to catch some butterflies on sunnier days too. I have had a few failures with hardware Raspberry PI projects. I prefer software ones but this is certainly the most impressive for the least about of work I’ve tried. I’d recommend it highly.<\/p>\n