The blue tit nest cam is home-made. Here is how it started life in February 2012 and how it all works now, along with what is used to get the pictures from the nest box to you.

What we used

• Blue tit nesting box - home-made is great, you can find simple plans on the web
• Raspberry Pi Zero WH - a miniature computer about the size of a credit card - from Pimoroni amongst other places
• Camera Module for Raspberry Pi Zero - we used this one from Pimoroni
• Software to grab the web cam images and upload - Motioneye
• A website to upload the images to
• A temperature sensor (optional)

The nest box

Way back in February 2012 we visited Center Parcs Sherwood Forest. One of the activities my son chose was making a habitat box. He chose to make a blue tit nest box and here you can see it being built. It is a simple wood construction (pine I think). You can leave the top front section off making it suitable for larger birds.  But with the top section in and only the hole giving access (as we have it), it is only suitable for tits to nest. Nothing bigger can gain access.

In itself a nesting box is a great addition to a garden. But so much more interesting if you can see what is going on inside!

Adding the camera

The camera system runs on a Raspberry Pi, a tiny computer about the size of a credit card. It can be programmed much like your desktop or laptop computer and has additional inputs and outputs that enable it to sense and control things. Crucially for us, it also has a special camera port. We connected the Raspberry Pi Zero WH to the camera and installed the Motioneye software.

Although the system worked first time, the low light performance was poor. This is critical because the box is rather dark inside, with only the small entrance hole allowing light in. To try to solve this we dabbled with an infrared camera lit with a couple of infrared LEDs. But the low light performance didn't seem to be much better and also the infrared camera shows unnatural colours.

Above: Part of the testing phase. The Raspberry Pi is the green board. Sticking out of the top edge is the infrared version of the camera. Either side of the Raspberry Pi are 2 terminal blocks with infrared LEDs pointing down. On the left you can see a small black component which is the temperature sensor. Finally at the bottom of the nest box you can see a mock up hand drawn nest for focus setting!

So we reverted to the original camera and solved the low light problem by increasing the light...the birdbox now has a large window on its side! The window is "double glazed" with a couple of pieces of clear plastic cut out from takeaway boxes. The nest box is installed facing East - it is best to avoid south because it gets too warm in the sun. For the same reason, the window faces North.

Above: The nest box is on the wall ready to have the top and front fitted. The black cable coming in carries 5V to power the Raspberry Pi. The rubber bands are to keep the tiny camera (pointing down from the top) in position.

Above: The finished nest box with the north-facing double glazed window providing plenty of light in the box.

Putting the nest box up

The box was put up about 4m above the ground facing East.

Web cam software

We use Motioneye software in the Raspberry Pi. It is very versatile and has functions to upload a photo every minute which is how you are able to see almost-live pictures. It also streams on our network at home so we can watch live video. We use Motioneye rather than MotioneyeOS because the latter takes control of the whole Pi and we want ours to do other things too, like report temperature.

The web pages

This is where me being a web developer helps. :)  I have set up a basic content managed website using my favourite CMS - CMS Made Simple. This is the site you are using now. It was based on a mobile-friendly framework called Initializr Responsive Template. It should work reasonably well on mobile/tablet devices which have smaller screens.

A whole 24h of images is kept. At times I check out these images and upload some of the good shots. You can see these in the diary.

The end result? A happy pair of blue tits having their daily life broadcast to the world!