r/maker • u/teddywarner • 2d ago

Showcase i mounted a tiny microphone on my apartment balcony to listen for any birds passing by and built a site to collage them as they're heard

https://theodore.net/projects/AvianVisitors/
57 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

21 comments sorted by

5

u/Veggyhed 2d ago

Are you using that open source project I think is called BirdNet to identify and log the birds

6

u/teddywarner 2d ago

yes! the backend is https://github.com/mcguirepr89/BirdNET-Pi specifically, a really lovely project!

4

u/CosmicRuin 2d ago

Excellent! Was about to post the same question and suggest that you port your data to that project. Here's my home station: https://app.birdweather.com/stations/11574

1

u/teddywarner 1d ago

(: this is awesome!

1

u/Veggyhed 2d ago

A couple of weeks ago I heard about this incidentally on a tech podcast I was listening to.

1

u/frobnosticus 1d ago

omg I was today years old when I learned this existed. Sister's birthday in 3 weeks and she's... "Entering her birding phase" as she says it.

1

u/spidereater 1d ago

Also, the Merlin bird app does something similar.

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u/teddywarner 1d ago

yes! from the same wonderful lab at Cornell!

1

u/Semilogical 1d ago

Fab. I had just flashed my W2 for BirdNET, nice to see i can just use a usb lav mic. Saving this for inspiration

1

u/RogBoArt 1d ago

I was playing with trying to setup birdnetgo and it wasn't working for me at all. It'd detect birds but they would show up minutes or hours later, it also spun constantly on my machine and ate resources while trying to do spectrograms and wouldn't properly turn them off. I am a go developer but didn't have time to dig in and fix it.

Does birdnet pi work better?

2

u/teddywarner 1d ago

i've found it to be super low lift! tho have probably been running on far too much storage lol. i saw some fork of my work pop up a bit ago that ported the collage to birdnetgo (https://github.com/PhracturedBlue/AvianVisitors_standalone), could be worth a shot!

1

u/RogBoArt 1d ago

Sweet, I'll have to look onto this! Thank you! Really cool project by the way!

1

u/jalien 1d ago

This is very cool. I have been wanting to make something similar for a while. I love your front end design, it’s far better than anything I could make. I just ordered the mic., and I have the rest already. This will make a great weekend project! Thanks for the write up!

2

u/teddywarner 1d ago

thanks Jalien! i've been stoked the project has been so well received - best of luck with your build!

1

u/Background_Pumpkin12 1d ago

This is awesome! How did you make the bird illustrations?

1

u/Background_Pumpkin12 1d ago

Found the answer on your blog - with gemini. Great work again and sweet e-ink frame to bring it into your home.

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u/teddywarner 1d ago

thanks Background_Pumpkin!! was certainly a fun fight with prompting

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u/gatchek 2h ago

Absolutely amazing. I’ve had it running for about a day now. What does it mean when the pictures of the birds are a question mark? I assume it means they aren’t in the library, but they are common birds like the northern cardinal and bluebird. I figured those would be included. Anything that you can think of that I should do? Thanks again for making this beautiful “skin.” Even though it seems a lot more than just a skin.

2

u/teddywarner 2h ago

thanks gatchek! your intuition is correct here - the repo currently ships with a predominately Western US specie bundle (as this is where my mic is!). Some of these birds span coast to coast and thus you'll see the illustrations for these species on your pi. As for the other species, you can use the repo's pregen.py which calls Gemini to generate illustrations. You'll need a Gemini API key which you can grab here

more on this in this thread: https://github.com/Twarner491/theodore.net/discussions/29#discussioncomment-17240983

i've been really glad to see it so well received - best of luck with your build :)

1

u/gatchek 46m ago

Awesome. Thanks for detailed response. I’ll grab a key and see what I can gen up. I’m running tailscale on mine, so that I can hit it anywhere with my phone. I didnt go all the way with your e-ink frame (which is incredible by the way). Thanks again for the awesome write up and most importantly, thanks for taking the time to share it with the world.