The camera is in the run, the viewers are somewhere in the world. In between there has to be a path that does not overload the internet connection at the run and still works for many people at once.
The setup
In the house stands a small used Lenovo, hardly bigger than a book. It fetches the camera picture over the local network and sends exactly one stream to the server. Whether ten or a hundred people are watching, only this one stream ever goes over the connection at the run.
The server at a hosting provider in Frankfurt takes the stream and passes it on. In the browser the picture arrives via WebRTC, with only a few seconds of delay. That matters: whoever feeds should really see the hens come running, not half a minute later.
The server has been running since 13 July 2026, at first only with a "coming soon" page. On 16 July the first real camera picture came through.
Small things that became big
- The camera has no 1080p. Its 16:9 settings squash the picture sideways, and you can see it on the hens straight away. So it runs in 4:3 at 2048 × 1536 pixels and 20 frames per second, and the website crops to 16:9.
- Every look into the camera app in high-resolution mode tears the stream down, because then a second full stream goes over the line. So watch on the website, not in the app.
- I am doing without sound for now, on purpose. The camera microphone would pick up conversations and noises from the neighbours' gardens, and that is nobody's business. So the Lenovo drops the audio track before anything leaves the house.
- A small watchdog on the Lenovo checks every 30 seconds whether frames are still flowing and restarts the transmission if not. Since then the setup heals itself after power cuts.
All of that sounds like a lot of technology for a few hens. But it is exactly the part that has caused the least trouble since.