To make it easier to observe the birds, I used a cheap IP camera from China. The disadvantage of these is that they do not provide any data protection and the images and location data can end up on Chinese servers. This is not a big deal for me when observing birds, but I would advise against using such cameras in other cases.

The advantage of the camera is the price and the flexible technology. For EUR 25 I got the YI Home Camera 1080p from Xiaomi, which can deliver very sharp images in HD quality even at close range. There are also a few projects that extend the camera's firmware or prevent the use of the cloud in China. A big benefit is the automatic recording of videos as soon as movement is detected. In addition, a recording can be made even in poor lighting conditions, as a black and white image is created at night using infrared LEDs.

After updating the existing firmware, I added the project Yi-Hack-MStar This project installs some features, of which the following are particularly important to me:

• Web server: Easy configuration of the camera via a web GUI, which can also disable the use of the Chinese cloud and app.
• FTP Server: This makes it easy to copy the videos from the SD memory card in the camera. This avoids the paid cloud service and allows you to access the data without having to open the birdhouse.
• RTSP Server: This server allows transmission of the current video stream.

The additional extension Xiaomi GDrive I haven't yet managed to get the automatic upload of videos to Google Drive to work...