Every now and then I come across a project that makes me wonder: How did somebody even think of this? Fugleramme is one of those.
The idea sounds almost ridiculously specific. Put a microphone near your window. Listen to the birds outside. Use AI to recognise which species are making those sounds. Then show those birds on an e-ink display, using beautiful old natural-history illustrations. And yes, of course, run the whole thing on a Raspberry Pi.
That is Fugleramme. You can find it here: https://github.com/arnegiacomo/fugleramme
It uses BirdNET-Go to listen for and identify birds. Fugleramme then matches the detected species with illustrations and arranges them on an e-ink display. When the birds outside change, the picture changes as well. The AI runs locally, and the illustrations aren’t AI-generated either: the project contains more than 800 carefully prepared cut-outs representing over 400 species, based on actual historical natural-history plates.
The creator even has one running at his kitchen window in Bergen, Norway, displaying the birds that can currently be heard in his garden.
I sometimes think we spend too much time talking about technology in terms of productivity, efficiency and business cases. Raspberry Pis, local AI and e-ink displays apparently also allow us to build a picture frame that listens to birds.
Projects like this are one of the reasons I still enjoy wandering around personal websites. I am sometimes completely amazed by the creativity of people. Someone sees a microphone, a Raspberry Pi, an e-ink screen, some local AI software and a collection of nineteenth-century bird illustrations — and somehow connects all those dots. Would I have thought of Fugleramme myself? Absolutely not. Which is precisely why finding projects like this is so much fun.