NEST-BOX/HOUSING - The nest box itself consists of a pre-made bluebird/swallow nest box purchased from a local Wild Birds Unlimited (they have a great FEEDER-CAM page, by the way) store. A small light plate was constructed of 1/8" lite-ply, to which six 6V light bulbs are installed to help with nest box illumination. This modified nest box was then mounted to a pine back large enough to accommodate the video camera used, and allow for a slanted roof, to help protect everything from the elements. A pine housing was constructed above the nest box to completely enclose the video camera. The pine roof piece was attached to the back, and also covered in clear plastic, for added weather protection. Brackets were mounted to the back. These are used to anchor the entire NEST-CAM housing to the back of our house about 15' above the ground.
NEST-BOX ELECTRONICS - As stated above, I use light bulbs in the nest box to help with nest box illumination, which enhances video quality. A total of six 6V bulbs spaced 60 degrees apart in a circular configuration are used. Only two bulbs are turned on at one time. The other two sets of bulbs are used as back-ups, if needed, for the duration of the nesting activities. A small microphone (Radio Shack part #33-3003) is mounted in an upper corner of the nest box to provide an audio pick-up (more on that later). The video camera used is a Super Circuits (model #PC-33C) color camera and a 3-8MM zoom lens. The camera is small, has very good image quality (420 lines) and a low lux (0.45) for a color camera, which makes it quite well suited to this application. In addition, the zoom lens allows a close-in focus, while providing a field of view about equal to the interior dimensions of the nest box. Wires and cables for lights, mic, camera, power and VIDEO-OUT are routed out of the housing and nest box, down the wall and into the house.
EXTERNAL ELECTRONICS - The 6 light bulbs are wired to a rotary switch and rheostat mounted in a small plastic box. This allows switching between the 3 sets of lights and control of their intensity using the rheostat. The 6V supply comes from an AC to 6VDC adapter, which is then connected to an event timer to turn the lights on every morning around 6:30am, and off about 4:00pm. The mic is plugged into a 35W PA amp ( Radio Shack #MPA -46). The amp drives a wall mount speaker (Radio Shack #40-1414), located some distance away, in the room with the TV used for viewing the birds. The mic is hardwired to a simple D-cell battery holder to provide a much longer mic run-time (I change the battery once per month to ensure continuous mic operation). For the purposes of recording the audio using a standard VCR, an additional mic of the exact same type is placed very close to the speaker and patched into the audio input of the VCR via a microphone line mixer (Radio Shack #32-1106). Power to the camera is provided by a 12V regulated power supply (Radio Shack #22-504). Camera video out, is sent via RG/6 cable to the VCR video input. That pretty much covers the overall hardware construction.
We have the luxury of using a 40" direct view television, which is a bit like viewing the birds and their nest through a microscope. It's a set-up I would highly recommend to anyone wanting really spectacular results from such a project!
Getting the pictures and audio uploaded to the internet was made possible using a Snappy video capture device, and SnapCAP software.
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