This afternoon the birdsnest outside my office window has been plundered by a crow or raven. Even though the parent-birds got reinforcement by two other fieldfares they never had a chance. The small birds only had a few days of life but they somehow enriched my days.
Category: Everything
BirdCam – feeding in slow-motion
Because there was a problem with the Raspberry Pi again today, I took the opportunity to film my fieldfares live for a short while. In this slow-motion video you can see how first the female arrives at the nest with a fresh worm. A short while later also the male arrives with a beak full… Continue reading BirdCam – feeding in slow-motion
Hatching time
Ten days Mrs Fieldfare has been sitting in her nest – today was the big day: until late afternoon three eggs had hatched. Now also Mr Fieldfare has to show some effort who has not been much around the nest lately. This is the first day in the life of the young fieldfares in time… Continue reading Hatching time
BirdCam v4
It took four attempts to finally get a suitable webcam to observe the bird’s nest outside my office window. Most cheap webcams, even those which show off with true 720p HD resolution simply cannot cope with the different outdoor lighting conditions over a full day. After a lot of testing and research on the net,… Continue reading BirdCam v4
Setting up webcam exposure under linux
I had some problems with fswebcam to set the automatic exposure. The exact way how to enter certain parameters is not clear from the lacking documentation, but it works fine if you set parameters through another command line tool. This is the script behind BirdCam: #!/bin/bash DATE=$(date +"%Y-%m-%d_%H%M") v4l2-ctl -c exposure_auto=1 v4l2-ctl -c gamma=5 v4l2-ctl… Continue reading Setting up webcam exposure under linux
Fieldfare
Nils Paakkonen was probably right, my new neighbors outside the office window is a pair of Fieldfares. This morning the whole family was at the nest:
First day with BirdCam
Last Friday I heard some strange noises outside my office window. To my big surprise I then noticed that there was a bird’s nest growing on the window sill. It did not take long until I even saw the new tenant moving in: So far I have identified the birds as Song thrushs and the… Continue reading First day with BirdCam
OctoPrint – a new attempt
It was not so simple to set up a Raspberry Pi as a 3D-print server as I had hoped. It started with issues with the WiFi-dongle, continued to a complete black out on all of my USB web cams and finally I gave up… I reflashed the SD-card with the latest full Raspbian Jessie image,… Continue reading OctoPrint – a new attempt
OctoPi – WiFi issues
Next step in my journey into 3D-printing would be to set up a server to remote-control my 3D-printer. Since two weeks ago I have a spare Raspberry Pi 2 lying around and Google quickly revealed the existence of OctoPrint. Ok, downloading the image of OctoPi and writing it to a micro-SD, making the necessary changes… Continue reading OctoPi – WiFi issues
Improving the Wanhao Duplicator i3 – Part 1
Yesterday I got my Winhao Duplicator i3 and when I was setting it up and adjusting the print bed I thought: “Is it supposed to be like this?” The print bed is a heated aluminum plate which is mounted on top of the Y-axis sled by four M3 screws, one in each corner. These screws… Continue reading Improving the Wanhao Duplicator i3 – Part 1