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Avian Visitors is a lovely project by [Teddy Warner] that uses a Raspberry Pi and microphone to keep track of which birds have been visiting your home, and creates a colorful illustration of recent visitors on top of it all.
It reports on a web interface of its own making, but what really takes things to a new level is an optional, stylish E-Ink panel that shows the last 24 hours’ worth of visitors at a glance in a collage.
The key to identification is BirdNET (GitHub here), a deep learning classifier from Cornell that can reliably identify and classify more than 11,000 species worldwide based on sound alone.
Based on that information, the system pulls bird images from a reference set for the region and creates a collage representing the breadth and frequency of visitors in a single image. The larger the image of a bird, the more frequently it was heard.
That’s a cool project, but [Teddy] took things one step further by setting up a color E-Ink display to show a running summary of all the avian visitors the system identifies. [Teddy] has a knack for leveraging projects into wall-mounted art, as we saw with his generative art wall plotter.
Got ideas of your own? Avian Visitors even has options for sending the latest detection to Home Assistant or over MQTT, allowing automation triggers based on specific bird species. If you decide to try it out and put your own spin on it, be sure to let us know by sending us a tip!
The GitHub repository for Avian Visitors has everything you need to get set up, and the basic system needs little more than a Raspberry Pi and a USB microphone. There’s a build video embedded just below, so give it a shot if you want to get a better idea of what birds come visiting.
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