Varies types of cameras have been used over the past 10 years. The current one is a standard security camera with composite video output which gives good results under all lighting conditions including street lighting. The video signal is fed into a PCIe video capture card.

The software used to capture the images is Netcam Studio , this can capture images from either IP cameras or a local capture card.

The BirdbathCam uses an IP camera which can deliver either single images or a network stream. This camera is set to capture a picture when it detects movement and upload it by FTP. These pictures are stored in a 48hr archive using a neat little PHP program called Single File PHP Gallery. The motion detection will be triggered by wind moving the feeder so you might see a lot of pictures with no birds! There are two version of the birdbath video stream available, the main page shows a live image using a JPEG stream, this works on pretty well any browser or phone but might only give 2 or 3 frames a second. The Live Stream option uses HTML5 to give a frame rate of up to about 20 frames per second. It will only work on modern browsers such as Edge, Firefox or Chrome but probably won't work on phones. Recent changes to Browsers means that the live stream won't display unless you remove the "S" from https in the address of the website.

Netcam studio is set to capture an images from the street camera every 30 minutes or so throughout the day..

All pages on the web site are now hosted with Webhosting UK because it gives more control of what you can do rather than using "free" web space.

In the past I have used several Web Hosts and from experience have found that the big name companies do not necessarily provide the best service or best value. I've been with Webhosting UK for years now and have found them to be both reliable and good value for money, they even have a freephone support number which is quite unusual for low cost hosting.

The software I use for the photo gallery is Coppermine. This is an excellent public domain PHP application that I'd recommend for anyone wanting to host photos on-line. You can of course use web sites like flikr etc but you are limited to what you can do and how it looks and there is more than often a limit to the quantity and size of files you can upload. At the time of writing the photo gallery has over 3 Gbyte of files in it.

The weather information is obtained from a Davis automatic weather station. This interfaces to the PC via a serial link. The program used to collect data is Weather Display, it has just about every option anybody is likely to want, in fact maybe just too many. Weather Display uploads data via FTP to the web site every 15 minutes and also to Wunderground. Wunderground stores all the data and produces nice graphs of the weather conditions since I started uploading them. There is also an option to view real time weather data. This means you connect directly to the web server running here and you can watch the data change every few seconds as it receives it from the weather station.