Show HN: An e-ink frame that hears birds and draws them as 1800s illustrations

intresting!

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

cool project!

Now this is why I come here!

Amazing thing, will replicate.

super stylin’

incredible creativity and inspiring. thanks for sharing this !

Author here. A mic listens to the sounds in my garden, BirdNET-Go (an open-source BirdNET classifier) detects birds by sound, and the e-ink frame draws a real 1800s natural-history illustration of each one as it hears them. Here’s a live web-demo from my garden in Bergen, Norway: https://fugleramme.arnegiacomo.dev

A few things that might be interesting:

- The screen only redraws when the set of birds changes, and dithers the collage down to six colours for the e-ink display.

- Bigger birds sit toward the centre, scaled by real body mass.

- 800+ cutouts across 400+ species, each cut from a real public domain plate. All art is historic and human-made. Coverage is currently best for the Nordics, Britain and Germany (but other parts of the world are in the works).

- Runs fully local on a Raspberry Pi or your homelab (yes, even the classifier runs great on a RPI)

The e-ink panel is optional and it can run web-only in a container against a BirdNET-Go you already have.

Happy to answer any questions!

Very cool, but IMO not mentioning https://theodore.net/projects/AvianVisitors/ as an inspiration is a very ugly move from the author

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That's a blatant copy of https://theodore.net/projects/AvianVisitors/, please.

We could also leave fake images aside, go outside and try to watch the birds ourselves. Maybe even let the camera inside, just looking with our own eyes. Real nature. No intermediate.

While I love this idea generally, the scope of the use of generative AI for artwork is too vague for my comfort.

The README.md mentions that "no art is AI-generated, though some has been retouched with AI." Superficially, that sounds mild. Some of the other closely-related projects, however, use different verbiage, or none at all.

For those of us with ethical concerns around generative AI application to artwork, much more detail may be needed before we could decide if this was appropriate for us.

Finally, we solved the problem of converting bird sounds into their pictures without involving human cognition. The great problem and the need had to wait for the great, ultra expensive, data-center-driven AI technology to appear on the horizon. AI is such a good technology that continue to solve many such great problems that humans desperately needed for their survival and progress. All at the a minimal cost of some effect on the climate, which may only slightly quicken the human extinction.

Puzzlingly, no animal species requires AI, which is a mystery that need to be solved by AI.