The smart nest is an instrumented version of the standard nest, fitted with a small suite of sensors that record the conditions inside and around it. Where an ordinary nest relies on a person to look in and report what they see, the smart nest measures its own surroundings continuously and without disturbance.
At its centre is a custom control board carrying an STM32F103 microcontroller, which reads the sensors and stores their readings, and a CC2541 Bluetooth low energy module, which lets the team retrieve those readings on site. Two sensors do the measuring, an SHT41 for temperature and relative humidity, and a BH1750 for ambient light. The sensors are embedded in the body of the nest so that they sample the microclimate a bird would actually experience, while the control board and its battery sit in external watertight compartments, mounted symmetrically on either side as shown in the design, which keeps the electronics dry and balanced without intruding on the nesting space.
Once deployed, the smart nest logs temperature, humidity, and light at regular intervals, building a continuous record of conditions over weeks at a time. The nests are placed by the team in permitted locations chosen to be well away from human activity, so the readings reflect undisturbed habitat rather than a managed garden.
Data is collected by hand. Every few weeks a team member visits the site and downloads the stored readings over the Bluetooth link, without needing to open the sealed compartments. The downloaded readings are then uploaded here as a CSV file, where they join the rest of the project's data and appear on the data dashboard.
The smart nests give the project something the citizen monitored nests and the field sightings cannot, a steady and fine grained record of the physical conditions in undisturbed habitat. Bird presence tells us where the focus species are, and environmental readings begin to tell us why, by showing the temperature, humidity, and light regimes of the places they do and do not use.
Placed in protected sites and left to run, these nests establish a baseline of what healthy habitat looks like through the seasons, against which disturbed or recovering sites can be compared. Over time this helps connect the birds the community records to the conditions that sustain them, which is the understanding the project ultimately works toward.
