Saturday, January 05, 2008

Realtime wildlife watching (deer/turkey)

Today I first read about "The Bug" over at Engadget's CES coverage website. Their article about The Bug's Announcement got my curiosity going. They didn't have a link to The Bug's website in the article, so I found it.

All I can say is this thing looks cool! My first thought when I read this was "I could build a realtime deer/turkey watching device!" I couldn't find the exact specs for the camera on their website. I don't know if that's because there aren't any specifications online yet, or the fact that I gave up looking fairly quickly because I can smell the food my wife's preparing for dinner.

But the bug's apparently got it's own rechargable battery. If it's waterproof, and the battery is big enough (your you can wire it to a big d++ battery(ies)) then you could leave it broadcasting to your wifi unit and pickup relatively live camera feed from it. Toss in some motion detection analysis of every-few-frames and it would be very cool. On one of the pages they advertise a developer-kit. I think I read it's free. Well, if they have any common sense it'd be free. Oh, and work on OSX, too :)

Concerns for now: waterproofedness, battery life, cost, developer tools and framework, convincing my wife this is worth shelling out large cash for it

Update: Subversion checkout: svn://bugcommunity.com/

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