A Pi 5 Frame Hears Birds and Draws 800 Hand-Cut 1800s Plates
A Raspberry Pi 5 listens for garden birds with BirdNET-Go and redraws an e-ink page using hand-cut 1800s illustrations, all running locally.
Fugleramme is the rare maker project where the panel’s slowest trait is the whole point. A Raspberry Pi 5 runs BirdNET-Go on a microphone, polls its API for whatever is singing, matches each species to one of the cut-outs, and redraws the page only when the bird list changes.
The hardware is short: a Pi 5, an Inky Impression 13.3” (Spectra 6), a mic, an A4 frame. Behind it sit over 800 cut-outs from public-domain natural-history illustrations. The panel is recommended, not required — without one, the same view runs as a web kiosk over HDMI or from any device on the network. It’s early: expect the odd bug.
E-ink is the right panel for an unglamorous reason: it holds an image without power and refreshes slowly, so the software has to redraw rarely. That suits a list which only changes when the birds do. Detection stays on the machine — no audio leaves the house — and an existing BirdNET-Go instance elsewhere on the network can be reused.
What I’d want to check is false positives: one confident misidentification and the wrong bird hangs there until the next one sings. The live view apologises for a dirty window; squirrels keep stealing the bird food. A frame in a Bergen kitchen swaps its page when a new bird calls. Run it web-only first; the panel can wait.