Pigeon Pi
By day, Robert Threet is a systems manager at the University of Southern Indiana in Evansville. But when he’s not knee-deep in network hardware, he races homing pigeons.

Credit: Robert Threet
Pigeon racing, which I’d always thought was the preserve of people from the north of England with flat caps and whippets (calm yourselves, commenters: my granddad was a man from the north of England with a flat cap – no whippets – and his friends were all over this stuff; budgie shows, too) turns out to have a following in the USA as well.
Things are far more sophisticated than they were when I was a kid. Back in the 70s when my Granddad’s friends were racing, each pigeon carried a little removable rubber ring around its ankle matching the unique number on a permanent band fitted when the pigeon was a chick. The rubber band was collected manually and logged when the pigeon arrived back at its loft by placing it in a special compartment in a pigeon clock, which stamped a piece of paper with the time. I was never allowed to touch one of these endlessly fascinating pigeon clocks, and they’ve always been objects of mystery – I was really chuffed when researching this post to find that a giant database of the things exists.
Nowadays, the pigeons are kitted out with RFID tags, and counted in by an electronic clock. The pigeons race over distances between 300 and 500 miles, depending on age and experience. Pigeons belonging to a number of different racers all start at the same location, and fly back to their home lofts. The lofts’ GPS coordinates are taken, and used to calculate the distance flown. The pigeon with the best yards-per-minute score overall wins the race.
What does this have to do with Robert Threet in Indiana? Robert has been using a Raspberry Pi to augment the pigeon experience. Whenever one of his own pigeons arrives back in the loft after a race, a Raspberry Pi (which he also uses to monitor weather and the temperature conditions in the loft) uses a motion detector to trigger a camera, so each bird gets a photo-finish.
Robert plans to set the Pi up to automatically tweet those pictures, but for now, there’s a problem: his WiFi doesn’t extend to the pigeon loft. Please drop us a line when your setup is tweeting, Robert (as opposed to cooing softly); we’d love to be able to watch what your pigeons are doing.
9 comments
Haggishunter
It should be easy enough for Robert to network his pigeon Pi using IPoAC.
Graeme Porter
The problem with IPoAC is that packet loss is much more upsetting than with other protocols.
You can also find a whole host of unique causes of packet loss – cats, for example, are more likely to cause packet loss issues in IPoAC than with any other mode of communication.
Liz Upton
That’s fantastic. You learn something every day…
Alan Mc
That is brilliant! I had a feeling the Pi was big in the Pigeon fancier world.
We said goodbye recently *sniff* to our “pet” pigeon Coco who had been living in the garage for the past 8 years. He was more of a Wrestling Pigeon than a Racing Pigeon. Miss him.
http://i.imgur.com/Z171ulH.gif
Liz Upton
RIP, Coco. That’s superb taste in mugs you’ve got there.
hans lepoeter
Racing pigeons was popular in holland to. My grandfather did and he had lots of friend doing the same thing. I think it’s less popular these days, but i still spot the birds doing exercise rounds .
C-F-K
In the west of Holland, it’s still very popular. Grew up in a house with pigeon racers on the right and left of ours, and my father-in-law is a really active one to.
A while() ago I also thought of implementing a pi into his coop, but the clocks nowadays have a full internal webpage, GPS logger and RTC for tracking the times and what-not.
But a photo finish/twitter message, great idea!
P.s. Mike Tyson is a big pigeon racing fanatic!
DaveF
I used to race pigeons, they always won :)
Seriously though, I used to have WiFi trouble at the bottom of the garden, just bought a cheap WAP and all sorted.
Dave.
Zsolt
I think, it is possible to make the whole system based on RPI. And it would be cheaper and more usable.
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