Annabel and I got our prototype working for the bird box, and I ordered a cheap passive infra red (PIR) sensor for a couple of quid. I spent a bit of time wiring it up to the Pi’s GPIO pins and used the Raspberry Pi Spy’s excellent guide to work out how to trigger and respond to events. The first thing I played with was a small Python script that gave a little feedback on screen to what was happening but more importantly lit up a red LED when the PIR sensor detected motion. Its a great example of physical computing and a really good way to play with some programming. I was very pleased with myself when I made the LED light up when people walked into the room!
I bought an extra long cable for the Pi camera and tested it out. Annabel and I cut some wires the same lengths as the camera cable to wire up the sensor and LED, soldered some female breadboard type connectors to the ends and hooked them up. We covered the wires in a length of heat shrink tubing and shrank it down.