BIRD BUDDY - The reluctant Twitcher
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- čas přidán 25. 08. 2024
- Bird Buddy is a smart bird feeder that identifies, photographs and catalogues birds that visit it. But only when it feels like it.
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Regularly asked question
Q) Why are there comments from days ago when this video has just gone live today?
A) Patrons / techmoan usually have early access to videos. I'll show the first version of a video on Patreon and often the feedback I get results in a video going through further revisions to improve it. e.g. Fix audio issues, clarify points, add extra footage or cut extraneous things out. The video that goes live on youtube is the final version. If you want to see the videos early and before any adverts are added, you can sign up to Patreon here: / techmoan
There were some nice shots, but I'd have been interested to hear what the maufacturer had to say about why this smart feeder misses so many birds.
This is random but it says on my end this video was only posted 43 min ago and yet this comment is 6 days old? Was the video re uploaded I’m confused
@Kenny C It is explained in videos description.
@@kennyc2421 same me
@@kennyc2421 deja vu.
This company won't exist in a year so you'd probably better ask soon. This screams 'start crowdfunding project, deliver off the shelf junk, fold immediately post delivery'
I bought a Bird Buddy as a gift for my wife. Had the same initial experience where it went a week or so without any activity although you can clearly see the birds actively on the feeder. But after an update it suddenly came alive and our phone's would blow up with notifications of visitors. Unfortunately after about a month on a routine charge it died and nothing we did would make it work but support has been great and currently waiting on a new Bird Buddy to arrive in the post.
3:30 - This is Techmoan literally fitting a square post into a round hole😂
As an american, one of the things that makes me so jealous of you Brits is that you have hedgehogs just running around all over the place 😭 cutest little dudes ever!
Hedgehogs are nice but I really wish we had raccoons here. I love their appearance, intelligence and their mischievous ways. Apparently some raccoons exist on mainland Europe (escaped from captivity) but not here in the UK. Badgers are probably the closest thing we have to them.
Not anymore. What Mat noticed about them having disappeared in recent years reflects a much bigger and terrifyingly rapid national decline in numbers. My garden used to get frequent hedgehog visits but i haven't seen one in years. They're now on the endangered list and will probably be gone by the end of the decade. No-one really knows why either, it's terribly sad.
They're going extinct though. It's rare to see them these days 🙁
@@jpaulc441 Mainland Europe here; never seen a raccoon or a badger. Seen a red fox once, in the middle of the city too, it was majestic. Hedgehogs are common, i filmed some in front of my window just a few months ago.
Here in Oregon we have trash pandas (racoons). They are cute little devils but they are not exactly friendly.
One issue I notice with the feeder is that it's a bit too easy for the birds to leave their droppings in the feed... The table should be maybe elevated a bit with a smaller opening for the seeds. Helps to prevent diseases from spreading.
Oh you can even see a bird leaving a nice gift for the others at 4:38
👀
I agree it’s currently set up to be a disease spreader
H5N1
@@gummybread The bird thought it was the Bank and left it's deposit.
Firmware updating my birdhouse. What a wonderful time to live.
For THREE HUNDRED DOLLARS could they not have sprung for the dollar and fifty cents extra it would've cost to put another solar panel on the other side of the roof so it could be mounted in any azimuthal orientation while still getting enough sun to charge??
Can't agree more. Btw I didn't know it was that much expensive.
For that much I'd want the software to be open source so you can host it yourself. How long will they support it before it becoming a dead weight.
Seems like a neat idea, even if not executed as well as hoped. I've got 2 unused blink outdoor cameras and it never occurred to me to use them as a sort of "trail cam" for the yard. We've got lots of birds and neighborhood pets crossing through that would be neat to see.
Frederick Dunn put out a video recently about a bird feeder that you can mount a blink camera in. czcams.com/video/H9SdTIx44Zw/video.html
I done that, got at least 10 videos of massive rats lol
That's a brilliant idea. Here in southern Georgia we have an amazing collection of critters that visit my backyard on a daily basis and it would be nice to see them all.
One of my Blink cameras is named "racoons and cats" beause of where it lives in my back yard!
This product looks like they just stuck a doorbell camera into a birdhouse and called it a day. Was it that hard to add a presence sensor? A bird needs to land to get the seeds and detecting that bird is a problem a beginner arduino hobbyist could solve in an hour.
Wonderful concept and such lack of effort throughout all stages of execution, what a shame, really
The concept is so simple, we're both probably kicking ourselves going "WHY DIDN'T I THINK OF THAT?!"
Software is cheaper than hardware, and they must have had a cost limit.
@@vylbird8014 yeah I imagine they just figured they could rely on clever software doing it for them but obviously it’s not clever enough
@@vylbird8014 I would say it depends on the amount of effort put into the software, which in this case, seems you're right.
Because a simple pressure sensor isn't SMART ENOUGH. Why would you do that and get reliable results, if you could use Artificial Intelligence? AI is cool, but coding a pressure sensor is dull!
(obviously this is sarcasm aimed at the manufacturer)
Pre-ordered one of these a few months back. Good to see a UK review from a trustworthy source!
@Rob Main it was a few months ago that I ordered it and reviews have been largely positive..
@@danielhitch probably because they have no idea it is missing so many birds, who would put multiple cameras to check other than a tech CZcamsr?
For the price its pretty bad value, especially as it looks cheap and doesnt work properly. Just get a wildlife or I.P. camera and a normal bird feeder for a third of the price. This thing looks like a cheapo Chinese doorbell camera shoved in a horrible plastic feeder. The app looks ghastly and limited as well.
I hope that if they manage to sort out the bugs, they’ll try to get permission from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to tie into their “eBird” database in order to vastly improve their bird recognition capabilities. I’ve been using their “Merlin Bird ID” app. on my phone for a couple of years now, and it’s ability to automatically identify a bird by sound and/or a picture is remarkable! (It also doesn’t cost anything. 😀)
That was a pleasant and unexpected heads up.
eBird is awesome, I've been using "BirdNet" for a while now their their song recognition is very impressive
I use BirdNet app for the same reason, works well.
Merlin is one of the most wonderful apps I've ever put on my phone. I used it while hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, and for thousands of miles was introduced to hundreds of different bird species from only their songs.
Never even thought that would be an app downloaded it now, thanks for the heads up.
It took me most of my life to realize the reason I've never seen a hedgehog is because they're not found in North America. I've seen moose, alligators, armadillos and pumas in the wild (obviously in different parts of the country) but sadly never a hedgehog. Nor a kangaroo, but that's more to be expected.
And I've been wondering why I've never seen an armadillo!
Jk
I live in North America too and the only thing I've never seen is a Chupacabra but I'm holding out hope
We don't see then that often in the uk anymore. I haven't seen one for years.
Hmmm... so I'm probably wasting my time looking for the Loch Ness monster in Lake Huron?
They're not found much in the UK anymore either sadly, their numbers have collapsed (some say by 95% or more) since the year 2000. Lots of theories (disease, habitat loss, brighter / bluer LED street lighting disrupting the natural rhythms of nocturnal mammals, huge increases in road traffic, a similar decline in the insects they eat due to widespresd pesticide use by farmers) but no-one really seems to know why :(
3:27 Woah. The way he swung that pole around was so badass.
You don’t mess with Techmoan!
It's possible the motion detection isn't sensitive enough, which doesn't make much sense considering any bird right in front of the camera would be easily recognizable as motion. It's an interesting concept, hopefully they can correct the issue with a software update in the future -- honestly doesn't seem like a difficult thing to get right.
One possibility is that they tried making the motion detection only sensitive to birds. They should've just made it sensitive to anything just like the blink cameras and let the user delete the false positives.
It's most likely a passive infrared detector - it detects differences in temperature rather than motion, so when it gets hotter, or even colder it might work better.
It surprises me that there appears to be no way of adjusting the sensitivity. I would have thought that would be quite an easy feature to include.
Personally, I'd make it weight-sensitive, so a bird standing on the perch activates it. A bird landing on the side or in the seed tray wouldn't activate it, though.
It probably has a timer and measures the degree of image change, and the duration is set for too long as most birds have very short visits. Or perhaps samples images for analysis far too infrequently.
I made a birdcam using a raspberry pi, HQ camera, and some software that uses machine learning to identify when a bird is in view. It worked super well. However it involved a bit of assembling things and a small amount of code. Got some belting photos. Maybe I'll do a video this spring :) but I highly recommend this approach. Can send you a link to my blog if CZcams allows links
Ah nice, was thinking a Pi setup a much better solution for this.
the first thing i thought while watching this is "i could probably make something like this." id be interested in your blog post if you wanted to give me a link.
I always loved hedgehogs. I work on an island every Sunday, where there are 4 hedgehogs in our garden, along with our 11 cats. I always pick them up so that our cars don't run over them. They eat dry cat food from my hand, and they allow me to pet them. And I am allowed to touch their soft belly, too.
The first thing I thought of was showing the camera videos or photos of birds to see if it could identify them. The bird recognition software is honestly more interesting than what pretty much amounts to a trail camera stuck to a bird feeder.
I used a trail cam to see who's cat was pooping in my yard & how it got past the fence. took nice pics & video. Like your solar panel, my cam ate the batteries up. Great to see you helping the wildlife out with the feeders. Squirrels in my neighborhood would chomp on that plastic feeder, it'd be on the ground busted in no time.
My assumption - it is using machine learning to determine whether a motion detection is a bird, and most birds are moving too quickly, and the images are not focused/too motion blurred for the ML algo to detect it as a bird.
Had a family member get very sick after complications from a surgery. And while they were still here I bought a Wi-Fi camera so I can monitor them from a different room. The only thing I don't like about every single Wi-Fi camera available today, is they all use an app. Which means they all connect to some kind of central server. Which means your information is being stored somewhere. Now this may not seem like a big deal to most people, but when you're recording the inside of your house and people's personal lives, I just wish there was a better solution.
You can access them through their own IP with no registration needed software, but you need a bit of tech savvy
Awww this invention warms what's left of my cynical, black, dead heart! What a nice idea. *Edit: Naming that squirrel "Gnawty" was brilliant!
What is the meaning of "Gnawty" or is it some compilation of 2 words? It resembles the "naughty". Thanks.
@@rastislavzima the joke is combining gnaw (to chew), with naughty.
@@owen1079 didn't know about "gnow" word, thank you 👍🙂
I think Gnawty was inspired by an enemy from Donkey Kong Country on the N64.
Hope you keep us updated.
I've taken note of this cute product idea courtesy of their current IG ad campaign. Thanks for pointing out its shortcomings especially given the rather hefty pricetag!
The gratuitous use of the word "Arse" took me back a little old chap. Shocked and stunned.
Like a lot of niche tech gadgets, it's an interesting idea with just so-so implementation. Here's hoping they can improve it with software updates.
@Techmoan literally and unapologetically put a square peg in a round hole on this one
"Bird Unlocked"
How I wish I was 16 years old again.
I had not seen this one, but got my wife the Netvue Birdfy camera for Christmas. It’s basically the same thing - a Wi-Fi security camera mounted in a bird feeder. I’d say the feeder design is a bit better than this one, easier to refill, and it comes with a separate solar panel which means a bit more setting up, but also means the feeder can face any direction, and the solar panel set in the optimum for sunlight. It is supposed to have bird recognition, but it’s a subscription service, so haven’t used it. I just connect to the camera and scroll through the saved videos. I don’t expect more than a dozen or so species in our northern British garden anyway, mostly robins on ours. My wife said she saw a massive tit the other day, but that was just about the same time I was refilling the feeder, so no idea what it was.
Wasn't expecting the joke to go that direction!
Haha nice one. THE NORTH!
@@rebbel67 Yeah, shame it was just the one, and not a pair...
Okay, that was clever.
Ba-dum tish 🥁
6:58 Come on everyone, please join in below! Altogether: "Maybe yours is faulty!" 🤔 🤣
I am a long time avid birdwatcher. I use a trail cam pointed at a 45 degree angle at the feeder, gets amazing pictures. I get daily in order of most to least: sparrow, blue jay, titmouse, and chickadee. I occasionally get cardinals, woodpecker, doves, and rusty blackbirds. Those 8 birds are the only I have documented in four years of using this trail cam. I had to dig real deep to figure out what the rusty blackbird was, I've only seen him once in 2021.
A proper trail cam doesn't miss a beat, the sensor on mine covers about half of the front of a 15x8cm sized camera. I would say it takes an average 5 pictures of every bird visit. I don't use wifi, I bring it in to change the rechargeable AA batteries about once a month, put the memory card in my laptop, copy them to a fast SSD, and then use left and right keyboard arrows in Microsoft Photos to quickly scan for interesting shots. It is often upwards of 10,000 pictures. Definitely not going to want notifications at that scale.
This whole setup is right on the porch in the living room window. I use the porch a lot and also stand in the window and watch them eat too. A lot of them are incredibly used to me and interact with me. Once a chickadee likes you they try to impress you, they are so funny. They'll land right by you and hang upside down off objects and look at you while chirping, they'll do close flybys of you, they'll stand on a flat surface and do back flips for you. Great birds. One generation of sparrows actually learned to do one of the chickadee's tricks by watching him. Last year the main older male crew of the sparrows started doing close flybys of me after seeing the chickadee do it. They only live about 9 to 18 months, though. It's new sparrows all the time.
I have come to believe that North American yard birds have near human equivalent sentience, near human equivalent language, and much more advanced culture than is typically recognized. I think the yard bird grouping is not accidental. I think sparrows, blue jays, titmouse, and chickadee have a deep and instinctual connection, akin to a caste society. This four type of birds in particular work and associate very closely and communicate with eachother. Blue jays absolutely can speak sparrow, and the sparrows pay very close attention when a blue jay is speaking sparrow. I've seen it many times now. Blue jays are the administrators, sparrows are the military, titmouse are the spies, and chickadee are the engineers. All four will peacefully eat together at a feeding trough. I actually have a lot of pictures with all four types at the feeder at the same time.
All four have a distinct organizational structure that compliment eachother. Jays rule sectors in male-female pairs. The male screams information on the status of his sector to the adjacent jay pairs. One of the easiest ways to spot a male jay is how distended his neck skin is from screaming status reports all day. The sparrows operate in four male four female units, typically 2-4 units per sector. They respond directly to jay reports of threats and attack them. Sparrows are incredibly aggressive with eachother and fight and brawl, they are constantly fighting and training. Titmouse operate in completely chaotic blobs, and have no obvious gender distinction. They only come around once per week, they are not assigned to a sector, but search a very large group of sectors in a grid. They have a very particular eating habit, as the entire titmouse blob will land in a tree nearby and will take turns individually eating. The chickadee are completely unpredictable, they will disappear for days or weeks, but then be there every day for hours on end for days or weeks. They are the smartest of the four, but are generally loners. They will eat with a large group of sparrows, but will only be with a partner about 1 in 5 visits.
I pay a lot of attention to my birds. The best part about all of this is how much the yard bird empire hates robins. When I first moved here, robins ruled this area. When I set up my extremely advanced feeder with unlimited food, the jays recognized the power of it immediately. The yard bird empire conquered this area and kicked the robins out to set up one of the largest sparrow armies in the county to protect it. There is one static jay pair that lives here, but they also lead other jay pairs to it. I think there are approximately 9 jay pairs that regularly use my feeder, with one of the pairs being permanent residents of the feeder. There is about 32 sparrows who have taken permanent residence in the bush right below the feeder, but other sparrow platoons come too. It is easy to tell the resident sparrows from the visiting sparrows, as the resident sparrows are morbidly obese.
Seems like a missed opportunity to stick a pressure/weight sensor in the red bit of plastic that the birds land on to not have to rely only on motion. And imagine if your bird feeder could differentiate and let you name individual birds and keep a separate weight log for each one over time :)
A microswitch at the end of a lever with the birds at the long end seems like it would work to my mind
@@fletcherd8883 snow and ice will probably be an issue with this setup
Better a detector that checks a break in light as birds are too small
@@fletcherd8883 Yeah in addition to snow and ice, you would have issues with spilled birdseed, bird poop, leaves, etc. A strain gauge would sense the change in weight as a bird landed.
and it shoukd hynotise the visiting birds, let the know about your enemies and add them to your birdarmy
BirdBuddyTV would be my cat's favorite channel! :)
Greetings from Germany
Our birds would get through that tiny amount of seed in about 45 minutes, and the thing would never stop going off.
3:20 - "Peckish" brand bird seed. How adorable is that name! 🐦🐦🐦🐦🐦
I'm sure those little hedgies were grateful for the little home you made them while they lived there.
With Techmoan, Saturday sure feels like Saturday again.
Cheerio, mate!
The birds you don't see are in stealth mode. Thats Evolution 😎
1:00 And here we see the Freedom Bird, the most American thing next to the bald eagle and cheeseburger freedom man.
I was willing to forgive the price for its features, but now that I know that it can't do the one thing it's designed to do I'm more and more convinced I should just get a wildlife camera and a regular bird house for maybe half the price
I was an early backer of this, too. I've had it for about six months now, and the early firmware were *TERRIBLE*. It literally didn't detect anything at all or record anything, when I was very clearly seeing birds on it. And the battery only lasted a day and a half. *I don't have the solar panel, I ordered the solar panel roof week 2 of ownership, and it's due to arrive next week.
Thankfully, later firmware versions have significantly improved matters. The battery lasts a week now, and it's pretty darned reliable at detection now. The automatic bird identification is amazing (when it works, which is about 75-80% of the time,) it even helped me figure out that one bird breed I was completely unaware of was in the area.
It's hilarious that it identifies "squirrel" as a valid "bird."
Also, I've regularly used the "ask our experts", and usually get an answer within a day or two.
As to the "missing detections," having it pointed at a "good" background seems to help. Our squirrels turn our feeder regularly, and it stops detecting well after the squirrels turn it. This has gotten better with firmware updates, I'm hoping it continues to improve.
This video was not faulty. Mat, I enjoyed the pictures of the beautiful birds.
It seems like a great idea. My dad would love this but the lack of captures seems disappointing. As you say, maybe they're trying not to overdo it with phone notifications but surely a happy medium would be for the Bird Buddy to send notifications when it has 5 images for example.
Also, I recognise that B&Q as it's my local one. :)
That would be easy to configure in software, that should be a setting the user decides.
Pretty poor design. But like most crowdfunded protects I don't see much updates happening before the company is dead.
@@volvo09 Yes it should take/capture the maximum amount of visits while the user has the option to turn up or down the volume of notifications per hour or day
Couple times I have some possum a few times.
And proof of raccoon hand prints in snow but no video.
When I was younger I used to work at a petrol station in the village I lived in and saw a skunk almost every morning (3AM EST)
Please keep at it with the hedgehogs, if one comes back more will follow and they really need a lot of help at the moment, for other folks too, even a bowl of clean water is enough to do your bit
PS, nice to know you're a man of nature!
Nice to see a jay in your garden! Only ever seen them in rural areas, they're fairly shy birds
It might be that the motion sensor is very short-ranged. When birds face away from it, the tail is very close to the camera, which is why you get so many with the bird's back facing the camera.
That's true I wouldn't be surprised if they took a trail cam and never adjusted it properly for both close range and smaller objects/animals.
I was glad to see you review this product. As a bird enthusiast, I’ve considered the purchase a few times but never pulled the trigger given the hefty price tag.
Love that you have a keen interest in nature!
Thanks and thumbs up. Thank you so much for not showing something from the 1970s. I miss the dash cam videos.
This is the tech I really love to watch you review, its weird and cool and sadly probably more trouble than its worth. I also just love how you like to see the nature in your own yard.
I think what you’ve demonstrated in this video is the blink camera is probably better at capturing all the video. So this would probably be a good DIY project. I think it’s something I may take up this spring because I will enjoy watching these videos with the grandkids, and we can use our own internal AI to identify the little birdies.
I may have a theory - and it's *not* that the unit is faulty.
I suspect it relies too heavily on object recognition and only reports when it is sure it has seen a bird.
It would be nice if it used some AI that you could train by going through clips of supposedly "birdless activity" and retroactively flagging them as "visit from a bird, it's the lesser-spotted blue-crested whatchamacallit" or something to hopefully improve detection.
Or a simple motion sensor with very near proximity threshold... really that's all it needs. Once it captures a pic then it can utilize it's database.
I looked through people associated with the project, not one of them has engineering background. You'll find management types, advertisement/PR types, a whole bunch of people with design background. They sold a thing first and then they for sure scrambled to find someone to deliver a semblance of what they sold. So it never mattered whether it's going to perform, sold is sold.
Go out there and tame the squirrel and any chipmunks if you have them. It usually takes less than an hour until they'll eat out of your hand and let you touch them. I do it up at my cottage. It is super fun. Then they'll get in fights over who can get the food you're handing them and it is hilarious.
I don't consider myself to be a bird watcher by any stretch of the imagnination, but this looks really interesting.Shame about the low number of images it actually takes.
Great idea - hope to see a follow up video once they’ve worked out the flaws, as this could be a really great product
It looks to me like the software is programmed to search for already recognised species and delete any duplicates before you get to decide.
I love watching birds looking out my window on to my front porch, so years back I got a nice copper feeder with a pagoda style roof. Being real copper it can be disassembled and polished back to shiny new from time to time. But when I first put it up, it took very literally years before I had a few birds. So much so that the humidity where I live got to the seed several times and I had to toss it out and start with new. But gradually I did get more and more birds. My main visitors are cardinals and tufted titmice, but I’ve also had black capped chickadees, doves, blue jays, and even red bellied woodpeckers. It’s very satisfying. My only issue has been, as with many a bird lover, squirrels. Even with my feeder hanging from to underside of my porch roof, seemingly impossible for anything but birds to get to, the acrobatic squirrels by me have leap-frogged off of nearby support pillars, landing roughly on the feeder and spilling seed everywhere. But thankfully this only happens from time to time, and when it does while I’m at home I scare off those darn rodents!
Any time I see a review of a kickstarter product, I feel the same way. The idea is brilliant, the product is really easy, convenient to use and is totally integrated with modern tech, but in the end it is an empty shell making you imagine that the design and business teams are clearly taking the lead over technical engineers.
My parents have one of these. The app is very 'stylish' but not intuitive/user-friendly. The issue my parents have is that theirs keeps telling them about visiting squirrels. Like you said, it would be great to have a 'black list' feature so you could get it to ignore notifications on certain birds/animals
This looks exactly as a device Matt would analyze 20 years later and figuring out what was intended for and how it works.
I'm pretty sure the squirrel was either pregnant or recently had a litter at the time the footage was captured if Mark Rober's information is accurate.
personally, I have a one-way mirror bird viewer that goes in our window, we can point a camera from inside and it can handle around 7 birds eating from it at once
Looks like the first VESA mount bird feeder!
W😮W - That is amazing - Mat, Well done you, Nice to see all that Wild-Life in your Back Garden!!! 😉🚂🚂🚂
Photo quality is awesome. This is probably the software's fault they don't send you all the photos.
I'm literally in the process of making a DIY version of this using an ESP32-CAM as the SOC. Thinking of doing a birdhouse with a camera inside of it too. Maybe see some baby birds grow up.
For what it's worth we have a 20 dollar small camera mounted inside of one of our bird houses. For the last 5 or 6 years we had a family of blue birds nest in it and it's been so educational and fun watching our birds all these years... My point being it was well worth the effort
That would be a nice DIY raspberry pi (or clone) build, nothing to complicated most surveillance software are readily available, maybe bypassing the solar panel for a power over Ethernet hat and cable and either a DIY, pre-built or fancy artisan bird house. A gratifying easy project with no hurry to learn and perfect from scratch. Towards a multi story living unit, hedgehog bunker, squirrel condo, and bird panoramic gourmet dinning. Some could make a channel around that.
@hitechguy18 esp32 video capture? That seems a little optimistic. For 8266 that would be insanely optimistic. Plus these don't even have Ethernet so... PoE seriously? Espressif have announced a processor which will be perfect for that but it's not coming for who knows how many months.
Annie sentence about a product that starts with "it's a smart blank" You know it's not going to be good. Smartphones are the only exception.
The smart in every other products name is actually there to indicate that it can attach to a smartphone via some kind of stupid unnecessary app.
Funny this video popping up when I've been thinking ogf trying to get footage of wildlife in my back garden. Looks amazing when it works
I saw these guys at CES in January. It'd a fun little idea!
5:38 "𝘙𝘶𝘯, 𝘤𝘰𝘸𝘢𝘳𝘥𝘴! 𝘛𝘸𝘦𝘦𝘵 𝘵𝘸𝘦𝘦𝘵 𝘵𝘸𝘦𝘦𝘦𝘦𝘵!"
Love these gadget videos ❤️😊
Thanks for this review. I'd have bought this if you hadn't showed that it was pretty much useless. It would have been nice to hear you contact the manufacturer and get them to explain what the problem was.
Naughty Da Nutty Squirrel.
I’m not a birdwatcher by any means but definitely a huge fan of nature- especially the ones who visit my yard.
Psyched u made a video on this type of subject & gadget, i know there are select fans out there who are extremely prone to crying if everything isn’t only about high-fi’s / ect..
This looks like it could be an really fun & enjoyable gimmick. I’d be game, hope it gets some updates if that what it needs.
I was so waiting for Gnawty Nuts to show up on the birdie bud cam...BUSTED!
techmoan is for the birds!
we brought a camrea for the garden in te lockdown ... awsome ... best buy ever .. its a " normal" garden camera with IR etc it does have a little moan now and again .. but t ses all our gang..the fox family , the birds and the cats ... nothing else yet !!!
This is the modernized version of growing old and feeling the birds.
Aw, it's one of those very rare moments when I actually quite like the premise of a kickstarter product, it's a shame that it doesn't really work quite well enough. Purely subjective, but the app itself seemed oddly complicated and yet too basic at the same time too.
As with any odd products like these, if you know how, you are better off making them yourself.
Just build a birdhouse, put that other camera in there and attach a solar panel. Then use software to filter notifications to birds it cannot recognize.
They can probably fix the low rate of detection issue by adding a "camera detection" option that turns on the camera every few minutes to check if there's movement going on and taking the pic and footage if there is anything. More power consumption but eh, what can ya do?
Maybe to not consume as much battery it could have like a sleep mode to turn off or reduce the number of checks depending on lighting conditions or weather forecast.
My mother would absolutely love one of these! She lives in the Wicklow mountains and there are dozens of different kinds of birds, finches and tits mainly, they do be like fleas on the feeders, it's quite something. Another commenter mentioned that a firmware update fixed the low sensitivity issue.
Honestly was better than I expected
I had practically no faith
I can see him in 20 years feeding the birds like any other old man and we would be watching him anyways
00:42 - a hedgehog! The most British thing ever. For an American, immediately brings to mind Yona from "Watership Down".
*beautiful creatures*
I have one of these too and by the rate I'm filling it with feed I should see many more birds.
They are quite active developing the firmware, so there might be hope.
For me it's still worth it, as I don't have a squirrel camera and therefore any photo of a bird is more than I use to have.
And the birds are clearly happy.
What a lovely idea!!
Wow. What a shambles.
How hard would it be to put some proximity sensor there and start recording everytime something is close to the camera. Seems not very well thought out
Aww you made a habitat for the hedgehogs. Thats so adorable.
What a great idea! And I'm sure that they can make this a very usable product with updates and the appropriate user options and settings.
Naughty the squirrel reminds me of the visiting squirrel that my dad was mildly obsessed with for a while, except his was called "Cyril"
Sounds like 90% of the things I've backed on Kickstarter: sort of works but not the way it was visioned or "promised" at the start of the campaign. I've stopped backing Kickstarters pretty much altogether due to being let down from most of the end products. Especially any with any sort of tech in them.
This is so wholesome! ❤
One thing that last view at the bird house made me wonder: can you take off the solar roof and turn it around, feeding the charging cable through the gap at the front? Feels awfully inconvenient only having one orientation the solar roof works in when they don't know what your house/garden looks like.
You continue to feel like a long lost brother! I love all your tech videos, and my side interest is now birding - I got into it from my late mother. And we had cameras and enjoyed lots of fox and hedgehog footage. I think she would have loved this. I do wonder how much is a kind of bias in that footage you saw. The UK is obsessed with birds like Robins, which are quite mean birds really. But they don't talk about, or possibly even dislike, a lovely Starling. I think we have a snobbery on birds. I wonder if that camera is going for bird snobbery. You don't want 30 videos of some common bird, you just want some Robin or your Christmas card.
Loved the video techmoan,im sure the manufacturer will view this and hopefully sort out the issues you have mentioned.
So cute !
7:00 the last one cracked me up :DDD
I assume this works via some kind of motion detection software that only takes a, 'snapshot', once the motion that's detected has elapsed after a certain number of seconds. Maybe the birds don't hang about long enough to get their pictures taken, or the software isn't quick enough to react, (the amount of time the bird being, 'in shot', being too short for it to notice), or more likely a combination of both, and so ignores it. Only the few birds who linger for more than the allotted time get to say, 'cheese.' Great idea, though, once the issues are ironed out.