Show HN: An e-ink frame that hears birds and draws them as 1800s illustrations
19 hours ago (github.com)
See also: Avian Visitors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48343424 - May 2026 (20 comments)
19 hours ago (github.com)
See also: Avian Visitors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48343424 - May 2026 (20 comments)
This is the coolest thing on HN that I've seen in a minute. The whole thing is a perfect blend of ideas with the end result of something that feels... magical. Honestly this is the highest inspiration to me as a builder as I just want to create magical experiences, even if they are just small oddities.
Agree, this was really a beautiful thing to see!
EDIT: no Ai for pictures - cool!
> This is the coolest thing on HN that I've seen in a minute.
Off-topic, but what is up with the increased use of the phrase "in a minute", presumably to mean "in a long time", lately?
I've only started encountering it in the past year.
Did it get popularized by some celebrity, tv show, influencers, etc?
seems like you know what you're talking about 5k% increase starting in July this year
https://trends.google.com/explore?q=I%27ve%20seen%20in%20a%2...
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It's been around in slang for a few years with a few variants, e.g. "I haven't seen her in a hot minute." I think it's just filtered into wider cultural vernacular.
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Scarlett Johansson says, “See you in a minute" in Avengers: Endgame.
it's been around. I more commonly see it as "been a minute!" when you see someone you haven't seen in a good while.
This phrase has been around for years, I know because it has always infuriated me.
They took a well-defined unit of time, which is relatively short, and made it mean “some unknown but very long period of time”.
So frustrating. /oldmanyellsatcloud
The underlying classifier, BirdNET, is a traditional neural network and not an LLM:
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoinf.2021.101236
Are there any LLMs being widely used for audio classification? I know VLMs are being used a lot in image stuff.
It always seems kind of silly to me to throw everything at an LLM. I know they’re huge and can automatically handle a huge number of tasks but something in me finds it wasteful when we could be creating easily trainable, cheap to run bespoke models for a lot of stuff
There are LLMs that support audio input, similar to those with vision support.
From my testing of open weights LLMs with audio support, they basically are only trained to recognize audio as an alternative to text input, they treat audio as basically equivalent to a transcript, and can't recognize or distinguish things like music, accents, background sounds, etc.
So they're only really good for transcribing or summarizing or using audio input in place of text input for prompts, but not anything that requires distinguishing any information about the audio that would not be present in a transcript.
It can be tempting to try to use an LLM for a variety of tasks; kind of the whole thing about an LLM is that you don't have to do a separate complex training run for every task, but can just provide instructions in natural language. But it only works as far as what the training data covers, if the training basically always treated audio and a text transcript as equivalent, the model has nothing causing it to learn other relevant features of the audio. If there's enough bird call identification in the training data of an LLM, it might be able to do that, but I think multimodal training data tends to be much more limited than the text training corpus
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https://github.com/earthspecies/NatureLM-audio
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Note that while the underlying birdnet-go project started as BirdNET only, it can now use Google Perch v2, BattyBirdNET (for bats!) and other models in the future. It's a really cool project!
Curious if there is a similar project for dog barks.
I wanted to say that seems like a stretch but then I often find myself visualizing my best guess at the appearance, including species, of an unknown dog. It seems like size of dog and pitch of bark are negatively correlated
e-ink is so much fun, especially when combined with ESP32 or BTLE boards. I currently have 4 around my house displaying book quotes that I've highlighted in KOReader and they bring me joy each time I see them. They are simple and do one thing very well.
I just got and setup a BTLE e-ink driver the other day and according to my calculations it will last _years_ on a single charge (2000mAh) even with multiple refreshes per day (crazy compared to the Wifi ones). Year+ lifetime completely changes the calculus for where to put these IMHO.
I'm considering designing a multiple-screen "art" piece to hang on my wall and playing around with various ideas (on both content and design).
LLMs + 3D Printer + e-ink is my new favorite hobby.
Years on a wall mounted eink screen sounds super interesting. What are you using for the power delivery/battery side of that setup?
Here are the parts I bought, I'm still getting it all setup (I have my pictures displaying, working on designing the 3D printed case now, and testing it all) but according to OpenDisplay's calculator [0] I can expect 3.4 years if I refresh the screen once every 4 hours (and currently I'm doing closer to once a day to mimic my ESP32s which need deep sleep and once-a-day refresh to get even month/months of battery on a charge).
Screen: 7.5" Monochrome eInk / ePaper Display with 800x480 Pixels (https://www.seeedstudio.com/7-5-Monochrome-ePaper-Display-wi...)
BTLE board: XIAO ePaper Display Board(nRF52840) - EN05 (https://www.seeedstudio.com/XIAO-ePaper-Display-Board-nRF528...)
Battery: 3.7V 2000mAh - (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FR9GH966)
Picture of it all assembled (no case yet): https://cs.joshstrange.com/zJFvGGPB
The image rendered to the screen is coming from a little service I wrote that renders a book quote it pulls from BookOrbit which syncs with KOReader (annotations, progress, etc). My plan is to set up one of these one each bookshelf/series rotating quotes I highlighted from the series.
Here are 2 ESP32-based screens I have, the one on the left is a an all-in-one [1] and the one on the right I printed the case from the TRMNL DIY kit from SeeedStudio [2]: https://cs.joshstrange.com/knk4Ns2h
Right now only the BTLE one is running OpenDisplay (the other two are semi-managed by HomeAssistant ESPHome) and all the devices are in HA for controlling them, though the ESP32's all deep-sleep for saving battery so I can can't "push" stuff to them like I can the BTLE one.
[0] https://opendisplay.org/index.html#battery
[1] https://www.seeedstudio.com/reTerminal-E1001-p-6534.html
[2] https://www.seeedstudio.com/TRMNL-7-5-Inch-OG-DIY-Kit-p-6481...
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Thanks for speaking to the battery question; I'm very interested in how to run this kind of thing (the display portion at least) cordlessly too, especially when lipo pouches in that range are so dirt cheap.
I might be misunderstanding your comment but the display is run/powered by the board so all you need to do is provide power to the board. For e-ink it uses no power to "hold" an image, only to write/refresh (sorry if I'm telling you something you already know!).
So reiterate, with a 2000mAh lipo battery I should be able to drive the board _and_ the screen for over 3 years if I only refresh it at most once every 4 hours (with "push" capabilities, I don't have to deep-sleep the board to get that battery life). At least, that's what the calculator says, I _just_ got my hardware to play with and so I can't speak from experience. Unfortunately my board is not charging the battery so I need to get a replacement which will probably take a week or two to get here.
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When it does run out, are you able to replace the battery? Or is it something way more painful than that?
It's a rechargeable battery, I just plug the board in (USB-C) and it charges the battery.
That's indeed a cool project and it's this kind of stuff that makes HN a unique corner in this digital world. I can classify this project with [1](Ranked #3 as the most upvoted Show HN of all time), [2](#4) and [3](#6) as non pure-software products that happen to also integrates hardware as well.
The only thing I wish to be added is a short video showing the actual frame in action to express motion and sound so I can better feel it. While the provided image (hero.jpg) gives me a sense of the product, I just can't smell it yet. I visited https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19393279)
Really interesting!! Awesome work
So many bird projects recently and I think it’s all thanks to this project[0]
It seems IP over Avian Carriers is finally within reach!
0. https://github.com/tphakala/birdnet-go
Link missing?
Probably BirdNet, but Google also has an equivalent model now called Perch. https://birdnet.cornell.edu/
Complete guess but I wonder if it's the Merlin project?
https://www.birds.cornell.edu/home/merlin/
As a fellow Norwegian I must say that this is pure art by the developer Arne Munthe-Kaas.
Wow! Every human mind is wonderful in its own way. It can come up with ideas that other minds can't even comprehend.
Awesome! It's really cool that it uses public domain images as the inspiration, too. And even cooler that you link to the places where you got those public domain images.
This could totally be a commercial product. I picture it being sold with a bird feeder. Maybe it uses a camera on the feeder.
Then have the screen look like a biologists notebook where he sketches the bird and writes a few notes about the time and its behavior.
This is such a cool project. My mom would absolutely love this if I made it as a gift. This may be a good project.
Another dev offers it as a full product. OOS at the moment though.
https://theodore.net/store/avian-visitors/
Was thinking this too. My parents are both avid birders, and I think it would make a fun addition to the house.
I was thinking the exact same thing!
Isnt this a fork* of https://x.com/WarnerTeddy/status/2060018688645115964?
https://github.com/Twarner491/AvianVisitors
https://theodore.net/projects/AvianVisitors/
Or maybe im missing to see is the same author? It went viral a few months ago
The new one appears to use real art from real humans, instead of AI art that was fixed.
And just because 2 things do the same job doesn't make one a "copy" of the other.
My mistake for calling it "copy", should have said fork maybe (?)
They are awful close to still require a reference to the original project imo. They are achieving the same output (identify birds and display them in a frame display all hosted in a raspberry pi) with that twist to how to generate the art.
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What is "the new one"? The old one used AI, and this one seems to as well.
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I agree I would expect a reference. Another difference between this an AvianVisitors is the image sources. AvianVisitors is all AI generated with a consistent prompt, but OP's is using chiefly public domain images with retouching by AI as needed.
Yeah agree
I understand OP is continuing the work and improving it as he sees fit, but that in my mind is a fork and should aknowledge the initial work that sparked it.
Maybe i'm wrong tho and this is completely parallel work! Waiting for OPs reply
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Fwiw an eink display is fairly common tech in the birdiverse. I also have a project that is the same thing.
Thanks! That one was discussed a few months ago:
Avian Visitors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48343424 - May 2026 (20 comments)
I've put a link to the earlier project in the toptext above.
https://xxcancel.com/WarnerTeddy/status/2060018688645115964
This one seems to be more North European focused
Its awful close with no attribution or mention of the original project, which should be the minimum i feel like.
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I've been leveraging Birdnet-2.4 as well, but also ultrasonic-pass and activity-v1 to do broader detection with an ecological targeted microphone. This means I can capture not just bird sounds but also bats and some insects, and acoustic events such as jets and cars.
Applying heterodyne transformations to the bat recordings makes them audible which is fascinating, especially when you catch them in a feeding frenzy.
Similar intent with an indoor display, although nowhere near as beautiful as OPs eink display here. I'm more aiming for a real-time ticker, but this design is wonderful. I'm quite inspired by it!
I've been working on this in the background for a few months, if anyone is interested repo with screenshots is here: https://github.com/simonjgreen/OpenObservatory
Do you use AudioMoth embedded mic?
That’s the one, in their outdoor casing
>I've been leveraging Birdnet-2.4 as well,
I love HN
Yep, when it's humans nerding it's awesome
This is the sweetest thing I've seen in a long time :')
Any easy way to get started on your own version of this without needing a mic would be to pull birds seen nearby using the eBird API and pairing scientific names. Won't be as accurate as a backyard mic, but will give you a direction to start.
Also if you have old e-ink device laying around, you can likely setup BYOD with TRMNL (or just buy one https://trmnl.com/) and send the bird images as a private plugin
The e-ink screens linked by OP are much more interesting from a color reproduction standpoint. TRMNL devices are either grayscale or 2 colors.
I would love to build one as a gift but would need to get it working for Australian birds.
Just release some imported European birds. What could go wrong?
cool proj
My granny is almost deaf and I will test the idea for her, for she loves birds
If you try it with her, I'd love to hear what she makes of it.
Love the aesthetic of 1800s illustrations combined with modern tech. Wonder if it ever misidentifies a squirrel.
I haven't tried with BirdNet, but Merlin doesn't seem to ever false-positive on chipmunks or squirrels (there's been a suggestion that it should explicitly recognize them, and maybe some frogs too, since they're "loud thing in the same register" and it frustrates people that haven't figured it out yet...)
I was thinking about building this for a while and now i don't have too, insane. Thanks!
This project is super cool! But the price of the e-ink board is quite steep
This is such a cool idea and I want to build one. I wish I had this kind of creativity. I can do the hardware/software side, but great ideas elude me.
are you setting yourself up to record ideas as they happen?
Very cool!
I wish E-ink displays were a bit more affordable. The 13 inch one is £229.50. Does anyone know why they are still so expensive, at least at large sizes?
This project will work with a 7.3" display just as well - they are £79.50! https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/inky-impression?variant=5...
Disclaimer: I am the CEO of Pimoroni :-)
I love the inky impression!
I am using my 13 inch inky display for my own birdnet - I also posted this in another thread last week https://i.imgur.com/5XbM6bb.png
I also bought 3 more 4 inch ones. Here is the first deployment next to the fish tank - https://i.imgur.com/nj8nKrS.png - I like this because I can stuff an rtl sdr in that box too, so it picks up nearby radio sensors in addition to BT. Real nice project screen!
I usually only refresh the image on the screen every few hours. I love how the image stays even with no power.
Yeah, the 4 and 7.3" prices are not bad, the jump to 13 is just large. That being said, the cost per area goes down, so it is also probably fair.
For a product that is made for creators and DIY, AI generated imagery on the product photos doesn't feel right.
You have to distinguish the fake color e-ink that are used in mass consumer products which are actually black&white e-ink plus an LCD layer and are expensive, and the real color e-ink where each micro capsule embeds 3 to 5 different inks of different colors.
The latest are pretty complex devices, very slow to refresh (hence why they are not used in your e-reader) and also very expensive. But the rendering is way much nicer because it’s real ink that is used to render the colors.
They are used in book readers. Amazon Kindle Colorsoft, for example. Or I have android phone with such screen (though, not latest generation).
Rather opposite: I never seen consumer products with two-layer displays.
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You can sometimes find old Nooks for cheap and they can be rooted to display static images, but it's not elegant.
Patents and greed in a combination.
Impressive, reminds me of this project https://theodore.net/projects/AvianVisitors/ I guess the author was inspired from there
Frigate, the IP camera security system, also does bird classification: https://docs.frigate.video/configuration/bird_classification...
Thanks for sharing. Didn’t know about this project. Have you used it yourself? I’ve only experimented with Scrypted for fun, but Frigate sounds like I could operate birdsong analysis without a separate BirdNET container.
I would like to build something which can do the exact opposite. Sounds from illustrations.
What would be cool is if you can put AI to identify individual birds. They all have different calls/voices, though largely indistinguishable to human ears. And you can name them and see when they come for a visit.
Something like fpcalc for soundbytes? Neat
Needs to also have an alarm clock waking you with this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4J1zyrW_VQ&list=RD-4J1zyrW_... :)
This is an excellent execution and refreshing to see the thought process behind it. Kudos. the ideas such as these, gonna keep us swim sane and specifically extending far beyond the 9-5 is no longer sideProject category but refreshingly needed one.
this is so cool :) thinking about some remixes already with maritime traffic and tides
Cool project! I set up an e-ink frame with this recently as a gift and it's been so much fun creating themed collections.
https://github.com/defl/hokku_epaper
Reminds me of Arthur's jounal
I just happen to have an extra Pi and an e-ink display sitting around and I LOVE this idea. Going to try it on my screened in porch - we typically get 10-20 Merlin detections on a decent day so this could be fun!
I built one of these that shows the hacker news front page, nyt front page, my most listened to album of the last 7 days etc.
Refreshes every hour
Battery lasts a few months
Esp32 and a colour eink panel, same as this one I think
That sounds cool! Where did you get your color e-ink panel?
I got https://www.waveshare.com/13.3inch-e-paper-hat-plus-e.htm from Amazon, about 300 gbp
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This is amazing, well done! It would be a great travel piece
Cool project!
On a side note. How do people deal with all the ugly mess birds cause in such settings? I'd love to have such thing but seeing all the white stuff on glass door does not really feel fun to me overall.
What do you mean specifically? These birdsong analyzers are sensitive enough that they do not rely on setting up a feeder. It’s obviously dependent on where you live, but in the Nordics, living outside city centres is good enough for both background noise and birdsong from nearby trees/parks/forests. Privacy matters aside, setting a mic up on a balcony or window is enough. Another solution is feeding data from a cheap security camera with a mic through wifi. This way the camera can stay outside in different weather, it’s not super close to you actual living area and splitting audio from the RTSP stream should be relatively easy to be analyzed by BirdNET.
Well I specifically meant having a bird feeder on a window or glass door for a chance to watch them live closely. That's why I put it as a side note ;)
You gave me few ideas for the analyzer setup too - thanks!
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Sounds like you've got birds crashing into the door? That's often something that can be improved (with stickers or hanging decorations) that make the glass more perceptible to the birds. (Another thing that sometimes helps is having bushes or shrubs, or even potted plants, in sight of the feeder - most small birds will use a "staging area" and fly somewhere nearby first, "check out the scene", and then fly to the feeder from there; it doesn't really control the activity, but it adds some options.)
This is one of the most wonderful uses of AI I've seen in a while.
I agree. It's such a pity Cats don't recognize images, would make for wonderful CatTV.
Bryce Shivers and Lisa Eversman would definitely have this in their boutique. Put a Bird on It!
Amazing. Best post I've seen on HN in ages.
All I'd get is pigeons and seagulls...
What is the energy label of this frame?
Chernobyl.
You should partner with Cornell Ornithology.
ok. a similar idea, you should put a camera outside your door and do the same for passing dogs.
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Please don't do this here.
German engineering at its finest.
I am buying an e-ink display just to try this!
I love this! I have a forest garden with lots of birds. I so want to try this project asap!
I love this new era of AI powered creativity. I expect we're just getting started.
Cool Project!! I like it
breaking this by putting it in earshot of a lyrebird
Most whimsical application of local ai so far
Super fun project!
So cool, I'm going to try building one myself!
oh I need to build this for my mom she would love it!
Why isn't this a thing on Amazon I can buy?
What a cool idea. I might have to give this one a try. I've got Raspberry's coming out the wazoo.
Now could you make one for urban noises? (e.g. traffic, trash truck, drunk guys at 3AM etc)
People are so creative.
I love it.
this is very creative, really cool idea!
coolest implementation of ai application case that i ve seens last months
Artig! :)
This is amazing. I want to build this. Curious about the authors “full garden” link, surely he doesn’t get that many birds in such a small space of time in his garden, unless he lives next to a park I suppose?
cool project!
intresting!
Now this is why I come here!
Amazing thing, will replicate.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
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!
If I were to make one of these as a Christmas present for somebody in Texas, and I wanted to contribute work toward good coverage for the area, how big of a time commitment would that be? It sounds like the kind of hobby work I could get into for a few months.
Less than you'd think, because you likely wouldn't need full "Texas coverage", you mostly need the birds that actually show up. BirdNET filters by location, you'll likely need a couple of dozen. Over the summer I've had about 40 visitors where I live.
Right now the coverage of North America is relatively sparse, but the interest has been high and I'm hoping for some contributions.
Edit: For North America the most obvious source is Audubon's Birds of America, which is public domain and should provide a lot of coverage. This collection includes some beautiful plates.
Do you have your image source available somewhere? I'm not going to build this same thing, but I'd love to add some prints of birds to my shelves and, not knowing much about birds, it would help to have a set of pictures I could look through and go, "Ooh! This one!" and learn about them. It'd be a good jumping on point!
Yeah, all art i attributed an linked in https://github.com/arnegiacomo/fugleramme/tree/main/assets/a.... Check the manifest for exact sources
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Very cool, but IMO not mentioning https://theodore.net/projects/AvianVisitors/ as an inspiration is a very ugly move from the author
Duly noted, I'll reference this, as well as other similar projects in the readme. Thanks for the feedback
Fair! Also, I would love to build this myself as I'm moving out of the city and to the countryside soon.
I'm based off Spain, so I'll be happy to contribute if I find missing Iberian and Mediterranean species, or if some cool feature idea comes up :)
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Thanks! Discussed a few months ago:
Avian Visitors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48343424 - May 2026 (20 comments)
I thought it was the same person. That is how close this project is. Inspiration may be too soft of a word.
Maybe for fairness we'll link to it from the toptext as well.
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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.
> Half the point of this project is showing off some amazing public-domain natural-history illustrations. Over 800 cut-outs covering more than 400 species, every one taken from a real plate and hand-curated for this project (no art is AI-generated, though some has been retouched with AI).
You can in fact both have an interesting bird-based art display in your home and also go outside and watch birds yourself. Neither precludes the other.
The next logical step is to have speakers for the backyard to simulate the wildlife that no longer exists.
An app like this would be used as augmentation rather than simulation.
I do recommend a decent pair of binoculars and the Merlin Bird ID app.
Or both. Why limit yourself?
Very cool!
I can't help wonder what this would look like for humans. Imagine, set one of these up at a party and it has the means to identify anyone on the invite list. When it hears the person it displays a photo, brief bio, and relationship status.
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.
Author here: Fair, i could've been more explicit in my writing. Concretely:
Every bird is a cutout from a real scanned 1800s plate (Gould, the von Wright brothers, Dresser...). The manifest (https://github.com/arnegiacomo/fugleramme/blob/main/assets/a...) links to each source, so you can compare them to the original scans. No bird has been prompt/diffusion generated, although I did use diffusion-based tools to remove birds from the perches (https://github.com/arnegiacomo/fugleramme/tree/main/assets/a...).
Nothing at runtime uses AI either, at least in the sense of LLMs or diffusion. The collage is Pillow and numpy, and detection is BirdNET, which is a classifier, not a generative model.
However I have used LLMs for code-related work, and for writing scripts for programatically editing the images, like cutting, contrast and colour corrections.
What is the ethical concern in this use case?
Could be for the montage. Is that unfair to say no AI generated the arts, but that AI put individual pieces together?
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.
Hmm. The project uses BirdNET-Go, which does inference locally on a Raspberry Pi. Then it looks up the species against a set of already existing illustrations. So in this case it seems like the "ultra expensive, data-center-driven AI" is not really involved in the core loop of this project.
The local inference is a product that came out of the data-center-driven AI.
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Amazingly unhinged response to the automated bird picture frame.
Do you not like AI?
Well, it's not a fruit or food that I can eat. It's not a shelter, It's not a fellow human or a pet. So, hard to say if I like it.
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