Birdbox - To Let to pair of Bluetits

Another couple of weeks has passed and we've had no visitors to any of our boxes so looks like our usual bird watch for this year is at a premature end.  Our neighbours box that was empty last year has a couple of bluetits in this year so maybe ours have decided to setup next door.

Bird activity has been quieter this year, we have a couple of bird feeders outside our front window that gets the small birds actively eating from.  We put them on strings to stop the crows getting at them, sometimes they figure out how to pull them up which can be entertaining.

We do have a nest in use in our back hedge right by the house which I'll be keeping an eye on but for the moment all the equipment has been retired for the year and is being reused as my test PC

Birdbox - Upgrading the central unit

The camera in our birdbox was connected to a 10 year old PC which just coped with recording the photo stills and the odd video clip but it was showing it's age.  To replace it I was after something small, cheap and low on electric use.  I've built all my PC's over the past 10 or so years mainly for the fun and the knowledge is good for troubleshooting problems.

Costing out parts for a really small unit always came out above my budget because small cases are expensive, I looked at an atom based build for the low wattage draw but was undecided as the atom motherboards didn't offer much flexibility.  Acer have a Atom Revo base unit that would have been ideal as it was so small but in the end I wants to build a new base unit.

So I took the bullet 2 weeks ago and ordered all the parts (not many really) consisting of motherboard, cpu, memory, harddisk, case and wireless keyboard.

Following is a short timelapse of me putting the PC together - as you're see there's not much to it, a little screwing and then connecting wires, biggest surprise is that it runs on 50watts.