Crow Watch 1.0

An App for Watching My Deck

Check out a basic prototype HERE.

But Why?

After moving to Oakland, CA from NYC, my wife and I were overjoyed to have an apartment with outdoor space. Soon enough we had a smattering of succulents, herbs, flowers, and 2 lemon trees.

Our joy and pleasure was short lived, however. A murder of crows spent their days flitting from perch to perch on our block, with several of these perches located on our deck furniture and railings. Our outdoor sanctuary was a crow toilet...Gross!

Inspired by Dave Ceddia's post about pulled pork and react native I decided to dive into React Native and AWS in order to try and prevent crows from hanging out on my deck.

What Crow Watch Really Does

Crow Watch taps into Expo's ability to connect with native features, specifically an old iPhone's camera. Crow Watch takes a picture every 30 seconds and saves it to my S3. Currently, the client facing app imports the stored photos and allows the user to delete a photo, or save the photo to a different S3 directory. The save photo feature is specifically geared towards collecting photos of crows to begin training a neural network. For more on later versions see Future Plans.

Technologies Used:

Front End

• Expo and Expo Client
• React
• React Native
• React Native Paper
• Amazon Web Services - S3
• AWS Amplify
• AWS Amplify React Native

Back End

• Link to Back End Repo: Crow Watch Back End
• Amazon Web Services - S3, Cognito
• AWS Amplify
• AWS Amplify React Native
• Expo
• React
• React Native

---

Local Installation

1. Get Expo Client from the App Store on your phone in order to view it in development.
2. Make sure to have an AWS account
   • This will allow you to configure your own S3 storage...sorry you can't use mine quite yet!
3. Git clone backend from above
   • Make sure to change IP address to localhost or local IP in Back End App.js:46
   • npm i in order to install dependencies
   • amplify configure in order to configure your amplify User and S3
4. Git clone front end
   • npm i in order to install dependencies
   • Configure the front end to match the back end's S3. This can be done in Profile.js

---

Future Plans

Crow Watch is a very personal project and an app that I will be continuing to tweak and perfect until it has helped effectively prevent crows from picking at my picnic table succulents!

• Crow Watch 1.0:
  • Customize Auth UI
  • Implement RefreshControl on Profile page
• Crow Watch 2.0: Access camera device's speaker in order to play a sound to disturb crows.
• Crow Watch 3.0: Use neural networking to teach the app to recognize crows in the most recent photo taken and play the sound to scare them off automatically.