Awesome work, that squirrel looks happy!
If anyone else has used motion on a Raspberry Pi, have you have any issues staying connected to wi-fi? I was running motion on my Raspberry Pi, trying to do something similar, and found that within 24 hours the wifi module would disconnect and stay down. I would have to reboot.
Without having motion running, I can stay connected to wifi for weeks at a time with the same pi/router/network. I haven't found a solution for this yet.
Cool :)
I wonder how hard it'd be to do 'squirrel recognition' with the camera
I've been mulling about doing something like that for blue jays and peanuts to ration out their allotment in a sustainable manner. A family of blue jays (or most birds in the Crow [Corvidae] family) will rapidly hoard whatever you give them and finish off a large pile of peanuts within hours. Unlike other birds that also visit the pile of peanuts I leave out, they have no intentions of eating most of those peanuts as they take them and just stash them for later (similar to a squirrel).
The other problem is allocating peanuts to other birds (chickadees, nuthatches, cardinals, etc) while not giving too many to the blue jays. However, there's a project I ran across from CalTech that can determine the type of bird in front of a camera via computer vision[1][2][3]. Not sure why the creator of the squirrel project used a camera though when a cheaper, more robust sensor would work unless he was eventually thinking of extending its usage for more than simple motion detection.
[1] http://vision.caltech.edu/visipedia/20q.html
[2] http://vision.caltech.edu/visipedia/ipadapp.html
[3] https://github.com/welinder/cubam