Birdbox project (I need some help)

Support
1

Ahoy

I am trying to set up a twitter birdbox camera. I currently have 3 scripts, everything functions okay apart from if birdhousereply.py is running birdhousehourly.py won’t work, I guess this is a limitation with the camera and python. is there a way i can combine birdhousereply.py and birdhousehourly.py so i can tweet every hour and reply to incoming tweets? i have taken the code from the tweeting babbage tutorial on the raspberry pi site,

auth.py (censored my actual twitter keys)

consumer_key        = '123456789'
consumer_secret     = '123456789'
access_token        = '123456789'
access_token_secret = '123456789'

birdhousereply.py (scans twitter for a mention and sends a reply with a picture)

from twython import Twython
from twython import TwythonStreamer
from picamera import PiCamera
from time import sleep

camera = PiCamera()
camera.resolution = (1920, 1080)
camera.rotation = 180

from auth import (
    consumer_key,
    consumer_secret,
    access_token,
    access_token_secret
)

twitter = Twython(
    consumer_key,
    consumer_secret,
    access_token,
    access_token_secret
)


class MyStreamer(TwythonStreamer):
    def on_success(self, data):
        if 'text' in data:
            username = data['user']['screen_name']
            tweet = data['text']
            twitter_id = data['id_str']
            print("@%s: %s: %s" % (username, tweet, twitter_id))
            sleep(5)
            camera.capture('/home/pi/reply.jpg')
            sleep(1)
            message = "@%s here is your picture" % (username)
            with open('/home/pi/reply.jpg', 'rb') as photo:
                twitter.update_status_with_media(status=message,  in_reply_to_status_id=twitter_id, media=photo)
            print("Tweeted: %s" % message)

twitter = Twython(
    consumer_key,
    consumer_secret,
    access_token,
    access_token_secret
)
stream = MyStreamer(
    consumer_key,
    consumer_secret,
    access_token,
    access_token_secret
)
stream.statuses.filter(track='@pibirdhouse')

birdhousehourly.py (run as an hourly crontab job, takes a picture and tweets it with a random message)

from twython import Twython
from twython import TwythonStreamer
from picamera import PiCamera
from time import sleep
import random

camera = PiCamera()
camera.resolution = (1920, 1080)
camera.rotation = 180

from auth import (
    consumer_key,
    consumer_secret,
    access_token,
    access_token_secret
)

twitter = Twython(
    consumer_key,
    consumer_secret,
    access_token,
    access_token_secret
)

messages = [
    "Hello world",
    "Hi there",
    "My name is Babbage",
    "What's up?",
    "How's it going?",
    "Have you been here before?",
    "Get a hair cut!",
]

message = random.choice(messages)
sleep(3)
camera.capture('/home/pi/reply.jpg')
sleep(1)
with open('/home/pi/reply.jpg', 'rb') as photo:
    twitter.update_status_with_media(status=message, media=photo)
print("Tweeted: %s" % message)
2

You should use backticks or four spaces to format your code, like so:

```
Code goes here!
```

Using quotes totally stuffs up Python’s indentation, and lacks colour formatting, so it’s virtually impossible to follow.

3

oops, didn’t know that, I have edited the original post :)

4

Nice. Honestly, I didn’t know about birdbox tweeting so sorry for asking: Where can I join this and get access ? I am totally unfamiliar with Twitter. Anyhow I am just about to finalize my birdbox which is equipped with RaspBerryPiZeroW and Picamera NoIR. In southern Finland birdnesting is actual april-may so there is still time to establish my gear… Greatful for anykind of help.

Thnx in advance
Carl Blyh
Helsinki Finland

5

this was really helpful in getting started with Twitter.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/learning/getting-started-with-the-twitter-api/worksheet/

Mine is the same setup, zero W, noir camera and some IR LEDs. I thought it would be nice to have the pictures upload to Twitter but also let people take a photo by sending a message to the account. I can also view the pictures from anywhere in the world.

It all works, just not at the same time… I am going to focus on it tomorrow night.

Hope this helps :)

6

There are definitely a number of ways to accomplish what you want, but they all have various trade offs. Off the top of my head you could:

  • Combine both scripts into one that runs all the time, tweets hourly and replies

Or:

  • Have one script that accesses the camera and saves out a series of pictures (every minute?), with the other two grabbing them as necessary.

The former approach is possibly simpler overall, but requires understanding and managing Python threading and mutually-exclusive resource access to the camera to get it up and running.

The latter approach requires some careful saving/accessing of images but could in future allow you to do things like generate an animated timelapse gif from the last X snaps and other fun stuff*

*There’s an interesting image processing lib here: http://imageio.github.io/

7

Thanks Phil! I have been doing a little bit of reading about threading, time is against me at the moment (nature eh?) so for now I am going to settle for tweeting hourly photos, that will enable me to get the box up and running, I can then work on getting the full version up and running with a development pi indoors and just deploy the SD card

I have fitted the box with two sets of IR LEDs and a NoIR camera. if anything happens to the LED I can manually go out and plug in the back up LED without opening the box.

Fingers crossed for some bird action!