The camera maketh the bird

by Arie van Ravenswaay, arievr@elsenburg.com

IIt is an early morning indeed on the Oudtshoorn research farm, the only ostrich research facility in the world. At four o’clock the researcher is already at work and checking the ostrich chicks in the incubator. These machines are quite large and have stacked drawers to put the eggs in. It is the responsibility of the researcher to make sure these chicks hatch safely without any problems, and that is where our problem starts.

This task can become daunting and every year during the hatching period the researchers virtually live at work. The chicks need to be constantly watched for several factors including heat, humidity, removal of chicks, stress of the hatched chicks and cleaning of the incubator. The day starts early and ends after 10 o’clock at night.

What if there were a way to watch the chicks, without disturbing them, from your phone or laptop, anywhere, at any time? A new concept is a small night vision camera connected to a Raspberry Pi (no, not the food, the microcomputer) and a Wi-Fi module. It is a compact device that can be installed inside the incubator allowing one to view these wispy animals and record their every move.

The Raspberry Pi uses an infra-red camera with night vision capability. This means that the researchers never disturb the chicks by switching on the lights. The researchers can still see everything happening inside the incubator, although not in colour. All recordings are saved to either the onboard memory, an external hard drive, a network drive, or a combination thereof. A video feed can even be shared live to an online platform for the whole world to see.

A choice of time-lapse photography, video recording, movement tracking and recording or photo tracking with movements is available.

This is especially useful as no recordings are made until the eggs start to break. It saves memory and allows researchers to see the entire process on video. Timestamps are available so the time taken for the entire process is recorded. If the lights do go on again the camera goes back to normal colour mode. Future models may incorporate various sensors to monitor the surroundings and log this data while recording.

This innovation is part of our drive to take 4IR and related technologies deeper into our department and in programme research and technology development, which are our core objective.

The possibilities are endless with new technology, and not only does it allow us to take greater care of our animals, but it also allows us to take care of our researchers.