WiFi Robin Nest Box

I've planned a 'hub and spoke' arrangement of bird boxes.  I previously described the 'Wireless Access point' box (aka 'WAP box'), this post details a 'spoke/satellite' box.

Robin box in the undergrowth

Robin box with Great tit...

This is a ground-level open-fronted box designed with robins in mind.  Last year, a robin family successfully raised a brood of three chicks about a meter away from this new box at ground level.  That nesting site has since disintegrated, so this is hoped to be come its successor.

The camera setup is designed to be generic so that I can remove it and swop it into other boxes designed with similar dimensions, in that way I can maximise the number of boxes, while not having to equip every one with a camera.

There is a ledge at the top that holds the camera section.  This consists of a Raspberry pi Zero-W, an 8 megapixel v2 'Pi-Noir' camera (sensitive to IR as well as visible light).  Underneath are 4x each of white and IR LEDs for illumination.  Power is via a 12v feed from the WAP-box, dropped to 5v via a recom r-78b5.0 1.5 switching regulator.  LEDs are powered form the same 5v source, and switched via a transistor array (ULN2003AN), on the R side of the picture below.  This allows low, medium and high setting on each of the IR and visible light, white LEDs.  The unoccupied left side slot is wired for a L293DNE to switch an IR-cut filter (to be added at some point later, for a how-to see this post).

The white LEDs are wired in parallel with a 50ohm resistor for each LED.  The IR ones are also in parallel, but with no extra resistors.

The circuitry is arranged on a commercial prototyping board designed with the same dimensions as the Pi zero-W.  The board layout is as follows:

Protoboard layout, same footprint as Pi Zero/W

I also added pins for a DS3231 real-time clock module, since the Pi is only able to get time from the network, and wanted to plan for occasions when it loses network connection (there's not enough headroom in the box to fit them on the actual GPIO pins).
As with most of my other boxes, video capture is via motion capture software pikrellcam with captured footage/images saved to a mounted network drive (i.e. off the box).

This clip shows the box in situ cycling through various illumination settings:

A couple of observations from the transition from 'testing to the real world...'
Pi Zero-W wifi reception once closed into a wooden box drops off somewhat.  Running the following command gives some idea of reception levels:  iwconfig wlan0 | grep -i --color quality
Output is: Link Quality=44/70  Signal level=-66 dBm

The impact of this is that I cant set PikrellCam to record video captures direct to the network drive, as it all keels over.  Handily there is an archive option, so I just need to keep an eye on it and archive to the network when need be.  I also dropped the quality of the live stream which seems to have stabilised it. 

UPDATE: A updated implementation of this kit is detailed, in 'Birch Log' nest box described here