For Christmas, my in-laws gave us a birdfeeder with a camera. Awesome idea and my wife loved it! However, the camera was copletely closed off, only worked in the cloud and had an app with a subscription. I already had Frigate running for home security cameras, fully local, and was not looking forward to adding a cloud based, subscription only camera to my setup. My wife agreed. So she gave me a challenge: Re-create the bird feeder camera features with a local setup.
I looked for camera’s. Landed on the REVODATA UltraHD 4K (8MP) POE IP Mini Camera,2.8-12mm Manual Zoom and pointed it at the bird feeder. That worked! Frigate handles the real-time object detection. I added some scripts on top to filter for birds specifically, log the sightings, and try to figure out what species we’re seeing. It’s not perfect, but it catches a surprising amount. Also installed a Birdnet docker instance and pointed it to our camera feeds and it now tracks and identifies visiting birds by sound.
The project still needs tinkering and its a work in progress, but Spring is coming and mostly this is just a fun project. Not everything needs to be serious.