Close

Next steps

A project log for Vending Machine for Birds

Simple, inexpensive bird feeder that dispenses peanuts in exchange for dropping stuff in a hole. A vending machine for clever birds.

stephen-chaseyStephen Chasey 06/10/2022 at 10:360 Comments

Ok, I just moved house a bit out of the center. That's been taking up my time for tha past 2 weeks. There are plenty of crows, jackdaws, magpies and jays here and I already have a bunch of jackdaws coming to my balcony. 

Now I can work on refactoring the circuit to fix a few annoying things I did with it, like passing motor current trought two BJTs for no good reason.

Main changes will be:

These changes should also make the curcuit easier to integrate with other things like SBCs or microcontrollers. One such adition I want to make is a camera that records when the motion detector is triggered. I plan to use a Rasperry Pi Zero-W I had laying around and a wide angle camera module I got for a few euro. I'll put thi in a large Tic-Tac container and place this just above the motion detector, under the half-jar lid overhanging on the front to shelter it a bit.

I hope to get the circuit fixed during next week, and while I'm testing it out I'll get the camera ready. The whole thing is moot if I can't demonstrate that birds will come to it and interact with it.

Discussions