BirdNET-Pi Acoustic Bird ID Station
| The BirdNET-Pi overview page with a heat map of the day's detections |
Description
BirdNET-Pi is an acoustic bird identification station running on Raspberry Pi. It listens 24/7, identifies and logs the birds it hears using Cornell Lab of Ornithology's BirdNET neural analysis model.
The detections are logged in the system and are submitted to BirdWeather.com. My station is configured to send Discord notifications when a new species is detected for the day.
History
My BirdNET-Pi station was launched in December 2022. As of March 2023, it is currently at 70,000 detections and counting.
Technical details
The BirdNET-Pi station is running on a Raspberry Pi 3B+. I built an outdoor enclosure for it and mounted it on the back of my house in the backyard.
| Computing hardware | Raspberry Pi 3B+, 4, or Le Potato |
| Cooling | Heatsink + fan |
| Outdoor enclosure | QILIPSU Hinged Cover |
| I/O ports (x2) | CNLINKO USB 3.0 Connector |
| Microphone option #1 (USB) | USB Microphone |
| Microphone option #2 (3.5mm + sound card dongle) | Sound card + 3.5mm lavaliere mic |
| Installation method | Installation guide |
User interface
Current design
Homepage
Because Birds currently leverages a Full Site Editing (FSE), open source, block-based theme from GeneratePress. This lightweight theme allows for a focus on the content with extremely-high PageSpeed scores across mobile and desktop.
Single post
The GeneratePress theme shines on single posts with a bold hero title section.
Previous design
Homepage
The initial theme for Because Birds was called Divi by Elegant Themes. Divi is one of the most common WordPress themes out there and the website used Divi's specific magazine-like Extra theme. Divi is less of a theme and more of a WYSIWYG platform with its own themes. It looks pretty, but it came at the expense of slow, bloated code and performance.
| The initial design of becausebirds.com. Pretty, but it had a large variety of visible categorires to keep fresh. |
Single post
Logo
The Hooded Merganser pixel art logo was designed by the talented pixel artist alurasheans.
