brianegge
Pulling my weight
I've been interested in a bird feeder cam for a while now. However, almost all are battery, wiif and cloud (and subscription) - pretty much everything you don't want in a camera. I couldn't find much in the way of wired cams, and didn't want to trench ethernet to my tree before I found out if this works or not. So I purchased a very inexpensive model off AliExpress (). Three weeks later the camera arrived. It contained everything I needed to hang or attached to a tree. I chose to attach to the trees with the attached straps. It has a solar panel on the roof, and that's enough to keep it charged so far - we'll see how it does in winter.
It connects to your 2.4Ghz wifi. It showed poor signal, so I setup a Ubiquiti AP on the side of my house in line of sight with the feeder. It connected to this AP and then showed 'medium' signal strength. Later, it decided to connect to an indoor AP, which it also said had 'medium' strength. Regardless, it's always been strong enough for it to work,
Because it's tree mounted, the squirrels can get to it easily. The camera has an alarm feature which will send the squirrel running, but he returns as soon as the alarm stops. The camera is not trained to detect squirrels and has no option to automatically activate the alarm.
The AI detection is bad. Perhaps other services are better, but the VicoHome integration is terrible right now. One thing it should do it take into account your relative location. This would substantially improve the model, as it a location layer could effectively filter out birds which don't live in my region.
Nothing on the AliExpress page said anything about a subscription, but once you scan the QR code to setup the camera, you learn about their subscription "options". I'm paying $3 per month for the Vico Home bird plan. I'll probably end the subscription, as it's neither accurate nor helpful.
Sometimes I do get alerts for birds, but the more colorful birds have been too shy to visit:
I found a similar feeder, also using VicoHome, but costing twice as much (Birdkiss Smart Bird Feeder With Solar Panel Review). I'm glad I didn't pay $250 for this. I'm not sure if any of the other cams have a better AI model. I'm not keen to train my own model (I already have multiple custom models), and this vicohome camera doesn't give you any option to do your own processing.
To do this locally, I'd need to trench, setup an AI bird model, and buy or build a feeder which I can mount a proper cam.
Bird feeder without cam:
It connects to your 2.4Ghz wifi. It showed poor signal, so I setup a Ubiquiti AP on the side of my house in line of sight with the feeder. It connected to this AP and then showed 'medium' signal strength. Later, it decided to connect to an indoor AP, which it also said had 'medium' strength. Regardless, it's always been strong enough for it to work,
Because it's tree mounted, the squirrels can get to it easily. The camera has an alarm feature which will send the squirrel running, but he returns as soon as the alarm stops. The camera is not trained to detect squirrels and has no option to automatically activate the alarm.
The AI detection is bad. Perhaps other services are better, but the VicoHome integration is terrible right now. One thing it should do it take into account your relative location. This would substantially improve the model, as it a location layer could effectively filter out birds which don't live in my region.
Nothing on the AliExpress page said anything about a subscription, but once you scan the QR code to setup the camera, you learn about their subscription "options". I'm paying $3 per month for the Vico Home bird plan. I'll probably end the subscription, as it's neither accurate nor helpful.
Sometimes I do get alerts for birds, but the more colorful birds have been too shy to visit:
I found a similar feeder, also using VicoHome, but costing twice as much (Birdkiss Smart Bird Feeder With Solar Panel Review). I'm glad I didn't pay $250 for this. I'm not sure if any of the other cams have a better AI model. I'm not keen to train my own model (I already have multiple custom models), and this vicohome camera doesn't give you any option to do your own processing.
To do this locally, I'd need to trench, setup an AI bird model, and buy or build a feeder which I can mount a proper cam.
Bird feeder without cam: