Wednesday 13 September 2017

Tortoise cam has arrived!

In exciting news tortoise cam has arrived!
I've put it together and followed a pile of instructions using a raspberry pi I had sat round not doing very much and now we have the capability to live stream the tortoises!
The instructions I followed are here:
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/live-stream-youtube-raspberry-pi/
And they were remarkably easy to follow.

Now without further ado you should be able to see tortoise cam, obviously this is running off of my home wifi, so it could well stop working at any point (and that's without interruptions from a 3 and 6 year old).
The live stream should be able to be found at:
https://www.youtube.com/c/BenBest/live

If you follow that link in the next few minutes you should see my wife and I attempting to put together a "tortoise table"!

Monday 11 September 2017

Tortoise cam...

Tortoises!

So in a not very shocking piece of news I've taken a(nother) break from playing with the meteor project. There are a number of reasons for this including 2 children, busy job, life and mostly it stopping being as much fun.
However we now have baby tortoises!
So I'm planning on setting up a "tortoise cam"...
I've got a raspberry pi and I've ordered a pi-cam so the plan is to set something up to watch them. I've even got a friend who's set up one of these before so have some help when I get stuck...
I'll be posting technical updates here with details of how I'm doing it (and probably the odd cute baby tortoise pic).
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The story so far:

We were given 2 very old tortoises (A'tuin and Molly) both over 100 years old, to our shock Molly laid 5 eggs not long after she moved in. This led to us buying an egg incubator at very short notice, reading the instructions meant we realised we needed a thermometer  as the incubator (linked above) had lots of warnings about how it wasn't great at keeping the temperature! We went for the bluetooth thermometer so we wouldn't have to keep opening the incubator door to check in on the temperature.
For those of you not following the links so far we've spent about £100.
Towards the end of August disaster struck! The incubator was knocked over, we lost one of the eggs and we were very worried about the others.
Then on September 3rd there was great excitement when 2 of the eggs started to hatch!
This of course meant more things! A tortoise table, a heat lamp, a heat mat and a thermostat. Fortunately we had had the vet on the hill round to film the tortoises and he had been kind enough to offer to source some of these things for us, they are going to turn up this week.
We now have the tortoises in their temporary home (an old draw), they are starting to eat and everyone is really excited about it.
More details to follow!