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  • Hacker News
  • Have been running BirdNet-Go on a Rpi3 with a Jabra Speak 510 device which has omni-directional mic array, along with rtsp audio from two outdoor security cameras, for the last 2 months. Excellent sound pickup quality. 76K detections and 112 species detected.

    I live in the east coast of Singapore near changi airport, and also run FlightTracker on another Rpi3 with a cheap RTL-SDR dongle with a 1090 mhz antenna to receive real-time aircraft broadcasts/squawks.

    So essentially tracking 2 different types of 'birds'.

    by jnaina
  • Heads up. I noticed the screenshot of your markdown card has an ASCII block that goes below the baseline. `U+2588` (Full block) tends to do that depending on a lot of things.

    I made a change to the markdown card sometime ago that uses only `U+2581` through `U+ 2587` instead to avoid that issue.

    It's under a collapsed block here:

    https://www.kyleniewiada.org/blog/2025/05/backyard-bird-trac...

    by KyleWasTaken
  • Nice! I never thought about using my security cameras but ended up building a regular Birdnet-Pi with a microphone. I took it one step further to make it portable so that I can use it when we hike or travel to new places. Added a little e-ink display to the front and it allows me to see Top 3 for the day, last detected, and total number for the day.

    Case I used to make it portable and fit the display https://makerworld.com/en/models/1336154-portable-pi-sdr-cas...

    by tacodestroyer
  • I always thought "US now has millions of flock cameras" to mean birdwatching cameras, how nice. Then I learned a month ago about the Orwellian surveillance regime they have in place, WTF, land of the "free", and neither free to move around without that being televised and no free healthcare? Even continental China give you "free from want" instead of freedom of speech, that seems to be an acceptable path for humanity more and more to me.

    Even in EU, we barely give freedom of speech to enemies of the state. (See https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/eu-sanktionen-putin-prop... , no right to a trial before your rights of travel being revoked. Recently invoked in one case that made the legal civil liberty news.)

    by a3w
  • I tried that with my Aqara camera. The mic there has no windshield, though; wind noise was terrible. Also I couldn’t get Aqara support to enable higher sampling rates in the firmware than 16kHz; BirdNET expects 48kHz audio samples.

    Ended up installing a better microphone attached to a RPi3A+ and using a RaspberyPi 4 which I already owned for hosting BirdNET-Go https://maciejb.me/posts/birdnet-go-setup/

    Much better sound quality now!

    by maciejb
  • Btw, Merlin Bird ID app by Cornell University is so good that I got some people interested that weren't into that topic at all.
    by comboy
  • This is a lot more wholesome than my project. I detect birds and automatically spray them with a sprinkler to keep away from pool area.

    code: https://github.com/mattsahn/bird-away

    Writeup: https://mattsahn.github.io/bird-away-blog/

    by sahn44
  • I did exactly this with BirdNet-Go and my Unifi doorbell cam. Unifi exposes an RTSP feed for each camera so it was easy for the tool to just "listen" to the doorbell and start classifying.

    I have a spare e-ink display and my next weekend project to follow onto this is to wire it up so it shows some faux "woodcut" images of birds detected, or something like that.

    by ben1040

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