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.
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