BirdNET-Pi

My computer room is in the front of the house, so whacking something there would be fine, all the windows have security mesh, so no actual access - I could pop a mike up against that with a window slightly ajar; that would prolly be good enough. Will have to give it a try!

 

Piggybacking a little off of Rass's post, has anyone managed to get a decent level of detection using their security cameras? I have mine outputting a RSTP steam, but I am not sure if its compressed and lost quality, or if its just too quiet to get any hits.

And has anyone had any success with multiple RSTP streams, or multiple mic inputs?

 

Woohoo! I hope I can find my micro hdmi to hdmi adapter…

 

nice haul. i thought the argon cases did a conversion to a full size HDMI ??
not the neo, but the ONE does ...

no one would ever be that slack, especially leaving g it there for a couple of years ...

 

Yeah, good thing. Seems really shoddy to me.



So, have had the system running since last night. There were a few problems in getting it operational.

The sd card I bought which was pre-loaded came with an older copy of bookworm... which was 32bit; this meant that I had all kinds of problems getting the NVME SSD running; eeprom version issues were a big thing, followed by figuring out that it was a 32bit dist.
Once I had that sorted, I got everything installed and did my usual "secure the box" thing. Ok, that's bad. Removing autologin means that the mike stopped working; some searching found this is a known issue with the pulseaudio requiring a tty login to work (whut? the enshitification of linux continues...) .. I tried a few of the work arounds, but had to give up and just keep a tty running and logged in so it would work. That took a while to diagnose!

Buuut, it's operational and is recording and recognising birds at the moment. Funnily enough, the next door neighbour is now having a bunch of concrete ripped up and replaced, so most of the birds have shut up or relocated for the moment as concrete saws are loud and smelly. Can't wait to see what else gets detected after today!

 

security camera mics tend to cut off at around 4.5-5khz and bird calls can wander up to 12-13khz fwiw so you're missing a huge chunk of the range. Most of the calls around me are in between like 1-9khz

 

well, the pi is starting to get a little sluggish while generating this visual.




also a reminder to all to backup your birdnet data often, especially if stored on the SD card.

 

have a look in the log and see what it thinks the noise is.
lightning is fireworks apparently

 

Getitng lots of detections of Arizona Toads, a lot of humans as well. This mike is very sensitive.

There's also an air-con unit about 3-4m away from it, and I think that is causing some issues since I turned it on.

 

engine engine number 9






anyone else got a green catbird near them ??
they sound like a baby crying. deadset i thought someone was killing their kid during catbird mating season ...
but then i noticed the time line and watched the live spectrograph one morning . amazing

 

So, here's my first day! I think tomorrow I will move the whole thing down the other end of the house so we don't get air-con noises.

 

More detections since moving the pi down the other end of the house.

 

50% more detections

 

The detections are still going...

Although with only ~60k detections showing over the last 496 days

so, approx 122 detections / day with 15 min sampling... seems about right.



remember folks, backup your database frequently, especially if you are running on the SD card.

 

I powered down and pulled the mighty gyvazla inside when the cyclone was inbound.

I'll set it back up this weekend but am considering a slightly different location towards the side of the house rather the back to see (hear?) if I can get more detections.

Also tempted to upgrade the mic, but seems a good upgrade is hundreds not tens of dollars....

 

AliExpress Link

it has no right being as good as it is mate. I don't know what it'd be like compared to your lapel mic but it rang absolute rings around mine, gives the Rode a good run for its money too

EDIT:

Decent EPOS one with selectable diaphragm pattern.

Nice little AT one, well-priced.

This cheap Bauhn one might be worth entry price, too.

 

$4.71 delivered. lol

Just ordered myself one, got a spare pi5 doing nothing. Might give this a whirl.

 

I was happy with it at $13, I'd be fucking stoked with it at $5!!

 

Got a sweet offer on that Bauhn one MUTMAN if you're keen mate:

 

cheers mate, i'll pass for now and compare hits in the new location.
i dont think there's anything wrong with the old gyvazla, just you know, constant upgraditis when i look at something.
there's zero need to make it a pi5 yet i have one in the cart at core ....