Taking Raspberry Pi outside

Last spring a pair of wrens moved into a bird box in the garden and they managed to successfully raise 6 chicks. While this was wonderful to watch from a distance, I thought it would be an interesting project for next season to use a Raspberry Pi and NOIR camera to be able to see what's going on inside.

Incidentally, I learned that when Wrens fledge, they don't so much fly the nest, as tumble from the nest..

Step 1: This post considers the problem of getting the Raspberry Pi camera to the bird box.

I decided on two requirements:

1. I don't want to power it from battery packs, I anticipate keeping everything running for a significant time and I don't want to disturb the birds during nesting.
2. The Pi will be outside the range of my WiFi so communication will need to be wired.

It seemed that using Power over Ethernet would satisfy both these considerations.

I used a TPLink Power over Ethernet kit to inject and split the power. My old NetGear router was dusted down for testing this.

The output power cable had a 5.5x2.1mm Jack, so I needed a converter for the micro USB Raspberry Pi power socket.

The splitter has a switch for 3 different voltages. It's important to set this to 5V for the Raspberry Pi input.

This is what the prototype looked like with some old cables I had.

The Raspberry Pi switched over to wired network and disabled the WiFi on startup. It was simple to point my laptop at the old network and open a session using PuTTY.

Next I will get a longer cable that's suitable for running outdoors. The problem of attaching this to the bird box will be covered in a future post.