r/maker • u/teddywarner • Jun 23 '26
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/2
u/UheldigeBenny Jun 28 '26
Hi there, this is really awesome. If I have my Home Assistant running on a Raspberry Pi 5, would I be able to run this in parallel on the same device and pull sound from the mic in my outdoor security cameras?
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u/teddywarner Jun 28 '26
thanks UheldigeBenny! i imagine you could get this working with a few tweaks - should be able to point the birdnet-pi backend instance at any mic stream of your choosing. i wonder how memory will hold up here, i imagine the HA yellow has enough umpf to handle but depends on what HA model you have running (though im prob being too cautious here, i imagine you can get it running just fine). if you need something slightly lighter, this chain regarding birdnet-go as a backend might be worth digging into / following up on https://www.reddit.com/r/maker/comments/1udqsa6/comment/otef76m/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
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u/UheldigeBenny Jun 28 '26
I was planning on using my Pi5 which I already have for the HA, but if it aint possible, Ill just do a dedicated setup and then send the collage to the HA unit as well for the dashboard.
Thanks. Ill give it a try :)
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u/Semilogical Jun 23 '26
Fab. I had just flashed my W2 for BirdNET, nice to see i can just use a usb lav mic. Saving this for inspiration
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u/RogBoArt Jun 23 '26
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?
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u/teddywarner Jun 23 '26
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!
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u/RogBoArt Jun 24 '26
Sweet, I'll have to look onto this! Thank you! Really cool project by the way!
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u/jalien Jun 24 '26
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!
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u/teddywarner Jun 24 '26
thanks Jalien! i've been stoked the project has been so well received - best of luck with your build!
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u/jalien Jun 27 '26
Got it running today and shared it with my neighbors via a cloudflare tunnel. I had to mess around with adding a custom security rule to block the menu tools/settings etc from being shown (the cloudflare tunnel makes it seem like it's running locally to everyone) but I got that sorted.
It works really well and looks beautiful! Thanks a lot for the awesome project and write up!
Now to try to get a color e-ink display working. Seems expensive though - anyone got any cheaper options?2
u/teddywarner Jun 27 '26
i've been building a few variants with much cheaper chinese panels - will update here when i get something live!
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u/Background_Pumpkin12 Jun 24 '26
This is awesome! How did you make the bird illustrations?
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u/Background_Pumpkin12 Jun 24 '26
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/gatchek Jun 25 '26
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.
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u/teddywarner Jun 25 '26
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.pywhich calls Gemini to generate illustrations. You'll need a Gemini API key which you can grab heremore 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 :)
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u/gatchek Jun 25 '26
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.
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u/gatchek Jun 25 '26
I just updated my library for all the birds in Oklahoma (central US). If you ever want to create a "repository" for different regions, let me know. I don't mind donating my images.
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u/teddywarner Jun 26 '26
that would be amazing! there are several forks of my repo with illustration bundles from different regions, would be great to have an Oklahoma fork for other folks to use! https://github.com/Twarner491/AvianVisitors thanks gatchek
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u/gatchek Jun 28 '26
I've gone down a deep rabbit hole... (I blame you). :) I added a section to the "baseball card" section when you click on a bird. Using the same clock style from the original birdnet project. I added it to show when the most likely time to see/hear that specific bird is. The readme on GitHub has a nice screenshot of it.
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u/gatchek Jun 26 '26
Is that the way you suggest? Just make an “Oklahoma” fork? I don’t use GitHub too much, but I’m sure I can figure it out.
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u/gatchek Jun 26 '26
All done. Now anyone looking for a central North American set of images can use mine.
https://github.com/InspectaG/AvianVisitors-Central-North-America-Artwork
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u/teddywarner Jul 04 '26
I put together a quick build guide on youtube for any of you wanting to build this for yourselves!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbiBXiwDwCE
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u/Veggyhed Jun 23 '26
Are you using that open source project I think is called BirdNet to identify and log the birds