Watch the duck LIVE!
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Thursday Evening, 15 July 2004Well, I came home from work tonight and found five little ducklings hiding in the nest, with a very protective mother duck standing over them. They didn't stray too far from the nest. I brought out the digital camera and took some pictures as best as I could. I also arranged some rocks in the water so they could climb out when they went swimming. One mystery- there were originally 9 eggs. I counted 5 live ducklings and 2 unhatched eggs in the nest. What happened to the other 2 eggs? Were they taken by a cat or something? Who knows. Anyway, I was happy with how things were going... I left and went to the store with my wife. When we got back, the nest was empty, aside from the two unhatched eggs. I am guessing that she led the ducklings to their new home, where they can gather food. I didn't expect her to leave so soon, but there's not much for a duck to eat in my backyard, so it makes sense. I'm glad I got a chance to take some pictures before she left, and here they are:
ducklings01.jpg- The best picture out of all of them... closeup of mother and ducklings Thursday, 15 July 2004THEY HATCHED! As I was leaving for work this morning, I looked at the duck nest and saw a tiny duckbill and a tiny pair of eyes looking out from underneath the mother duck. I'm sure there are more ducklings under there. The mother sits on the nest most of the time, so its hard to see them in the webcam but if she gets up and leaves, there might be a good chance to see them. When I get home from work tonight I will go try to get some decent photos with the digital camera. Wednesday, 14 July 2004I still have occaisonal problems with the new camera. It gets into a weird mode where the brightness is too high, and the image is just a white square. If I fiddle with the settings manually, sometimes I can get it working again. The ducklings should hatch any day now. Friday, 9 July 2004The new camera finally arrived. Its a newer version of the Logitech Quickcam Express I've been using. I spent this evening building a new mount out of some AL diamond plate material I had lying around from my BattleBot days. This new mount holds the camera at a much more natural viewing angle, so the image should be easy to identify. Just before the sun went down, I tried to aim and focus the camera... I might need to tweak it tomorrow in the daylight. Lets hope this new camera will be more reliable than the old one. Tomorrow I'll try to post some pictures of the new camera mount. Duck eggs: I studied up on duck eggs, and discovered that they generally take 28 days to hatch. Based on the day I found the nest and the previous time I mowed the lawn, I can say with certainty that the eggs will hatch sometime between July 5 and July 21. Since today is already the 9th, this means ANY DAY NOW! Wednesday, 7 July 2004Once again, the camera has puked. I don't know what's causing it, but I might not be able to fix it a second time. The replacement camera should be arriving shortly. Update: While looking at the images coming from the camera, I noticed that the white squares actually had a little blob of an image in them. I used some manual driver commands to turn down the brightness, and I started getting a decent image out of the camera. It appears that the automatic gain control of the camera is not working 100% of the time. I tweaked some settings, and it seems to be working a little better now, but I think the new camera will probably work better when it arrives. Monday, 5 July 2004Now... the good news. The webcam is working again. Here's the technical details of the repair: I took a closer look at the linux machine running the camera. I noticed that the USB driver was still loading and detecting the camera just fine, but all I got in the image was a white screen. This meant that the camera interface was still working, but the CCD was not functioning correctly. The camera experiences some temperature swings from direct sunlight to cool nights. Extreme temperatures have a way of exposing poor solder joints. So I took the camera apart and inspected all the solder joints. None of them looked bad, but I fired up my soldering iron, and reflowed every joint I could find. I put the camera back together, and hooked it up out in the garage, and presto- It was resurrected! Its about 11:30 at night, and the duck is gone for the moment, so I propped up a flashlight to aim and focus the camera. It might need a few adjustments tomorrow when its daylight, but it seems to be back up for now. I'll keep the new camera I bought off ebay when it arrives as a backup just in case it happens again. Sunday, 4 July 2004Bad news... I got up this morning and the webcam had stopped working. I tried re-booting the webcam machine, and now the usb camera image is nothing but a white screen. As far as I can tell, the camera has kicked the bucket. I'll be messing with it a little today to see if I can make it work again, but in the meantime, I put in a bid on ebay for a replacement camera which uses the same linux driver. It should be a plug-in replacement. For anyone interested, here are some pictures of the webcam setup: wcsetup1.jpg -Computer inside the garage wcsetup2.jpg -See the knot hole that made it easy to route the camera cable wcsetup3.jpg -Here's the CAT5 cable (blue) running back over to the house wcsetup4.jpg -On the other side of the wall, you can see the camera mounted wcsetup5.jpg -Close-up of the camera and the duck wcsetup6.jpg -Another angle of camera and duck wcsetup7.jpg -Here you can see the water pan I set up... I don't know if she uses it or not wcsetup8.jpg -And here you can see the pathway I cleared from the nest to the water closeup.jpg -She seems to have gotten used to me, just a little bit. She allowed me to take this extreme closeup without getting TOO upset. Friday, 2 July 2004I decided that there's not enough detail visible in the webcam picture, so I moved the camera down lower close to the nest. Focusing the camera is a tough job, since I have to twist the lense slightly, and run inside the house to check the picture, and then go twist again. I've got quite a collection of pictures in the archive now, all of just one day so far. If I can figure out how to animate a collection of JPGs, I'll make it into a movie. Thursday, 1 July 2004Well, I finally did it. I spent the evening running CAT5 out to the garage, and ran some power too. I moved the webcam computer out to a shelf against the wall opposite the duck. I built a bracket out of scrap aluminium to mount the camera on, and to also shield it from the direct sunlight that hits the back of the garage early in the day. I installed the camera after dark, so I might need to adjust the aim tomorrow when I can actually see the picture. I got hissed at a couple times while installing the camera, I guess she didn't like my flashlight too much. I'm not sure how well the camera will hold up being exposed in the outdoors like that, but at least its shaded. I'll post some pictures of the whole webcam setup later. Monday, 28 July 2004I spent the weekend building a webcam. I got some old computer parts and scraped together a bare-bones system. I installed linux and got the Logitech Quickcam driver to work. For now, there's a live picture of the couch in my basement, nothing too exciting to look at. My wife thinks I'm crazy for spending time on this, but I'm somewhat obsessed with the whole project at this point. Wednesday, 23 June 2004I came home from work, and the duck was gone! The nest had been carefully covered with feathers and debris, and was hidden very well. I grabbed the opportunity to take some pictures before she returned to the nest.
nest1.jpg- The nest is down behind the cinder blocks... can you see it? I'm thinking it might be fun to set up a webcam to see when the ducklings hatch... I've got a USB camera, I just need to scrape together an old computer to set up in the garage, and run some CAT5 from the house. Then I could run a script to transfer live images to this web page. Tuesday, 22 June 2004The duck is still there. She hisses at me if I come too close, but she's not leaving that nest. Monday, 21 June 2004While mowing the lawn, I started mowing close to the garden. When I reached the corner, something flew out of the tall grass,and scared the crap out of me! I thought it was a dog or a rabbit at first... it turned out to be a duck! She flew to the middle of the yard and just sat there watching me. I thought it was odd that she didn't just fly away, then I had a thought. I looked in the tall grass and sure enough, there was a nest with 9 eggs in it. |
