A year ago or so I came across this awesome article on how to build your very own all sky camera. For those who haven’t heard of these, basically imagine having a camera capturing the night sky, night after night, and compiling it all while you sleep in your warm bed.

I grabbed a Raspberry Pi 4 and an HQ camera, an electronic enclosure and an acrylic dome. Slapped it all together and followed the directions at the AllskyTeam Github. The system worked great.

But once I had it up and running, then what? I mean, all day it’s just sitting there, waiting for the sun to get out of the way so it can get more stunning photos.

So yet again, cruising through sites like Hackaday and I come across a project that catches my eye. I ended up on a more recently maintained fork of the original BirdNET-Pi, Nachtzuster’s BirdNET-Pi. After buying some supporting hardware, namely a USB Sound Card and a lapel microphone, I started playing with it on a Raspberry Pi 5. Up and running and it’s pretty damn cool. Except I’ve got it going on a box that can’t go anywhere uncovered outside.

Well I’ve got one box that has to out in the open and another that can’t go out that far. One runs all night and the other is doing most of it’s work during the day. Sounded like an opportunity to bring this all together in a single box.

Add on top of this is a desire to remotely place the box away from the house and not require AC power and I’ve got a bigger project to start working on. I also want to rebuild the enclosure to make it more resilient in the desert heat and freezing winters. Thus was born the concept of a NaturePi.

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NaturePi Hardware

NaturePi Software

NaturePi Power