Birdbox Battles

A bird box can be a dangerous place... photos from Saturday morning after the Blue Tits have been setting up home for about a week:

Is breakfast ready?

A nice sharp beak

Open wide!

Birdbox Update for the week

At the moment at least, not that many people seem to be reading the bird box blog posts, perhaps because thus far they've been more on the technical side of setting up the cameras and infrared illumination. So here are a few more pictures...

CCTV lenses on an Xbox Webcam

Anyone following this blog will know I've been hacking Xbox Live Vision web cameras for fun. This started with removing the lens, and attaching a telescope - which is great for photographing the moon, or the bottom of the garden. The M12 x 0.5mm thread (aka S-Mount) is also used on many CCTV cameras, so you can get alternative lenses covering a range of focal lengths. I decided to buy a £10 set on eBay and try them out.

Xbox Birdbox Mk III

Yes, I made a third bird box with an infrared modified Xbox Live Vision webcam. This used 4 IR LEDs as in my original design, but splayed even more than in my second attempt.

4 IR LEDs on webcam

Crude wooden clamps

Webcam installed in birdbox

Another eBay webcam with Entron inside

I've been using eBay late at night again for impulse purchases... this was a £2 webcam claiming 5.0MP (which turned out to be 0.3MP again).

Square 0.3MP webcam

My favourite thing about it is the packaging where on the back there is nice spoofed Skype logo:

Skype, Free internt telephony that just sucks [sic]