KEITH HAMMOND is editor-in-
chief of Make: and believes ravens
are the best bird, because they rawk.
Adobe Stock-Piotr Krzeslak, BirdNET-Pi
In 2016 the bird nerds at the Cornell Lab
of Ornithology collab’ed with coders at TU
Chemnitz in Germany to create BirdNET — an
artificial neural network that recognizes 3,000
different birds by sound alone (birdnet.cornell.
edu). Next they turned it into a free phone app
— imagine stashing John James Audubon, Sir
David Attenborough, and the real James Bond
(legendary ornithologist) in your pocket to help
identify avian species when you’re out on the trail.
But what if you’d like to ID every bird at your
location, all the time? Now there’s BirdNET-Pi,
a dedicated version for installing on a Raspberry
Pi (birdnetpi.com). It does 24/7 recording and
analysis, automatically extracts birdsongs and
creates spectrograms (Figure
A
), and logs every
species detected (Figure
B
). If you wish, it’ll host
its own web server for remote access, stream
live audio, send notifications, and integrate with
BirdWeather to share your data. It’s an awesome
citizen science project for just a few bucks!
The team has begun work on a TFLite version
for the Arduino Nano 33 BLE, because it has a
mic, says team leader Dr. Stefan Kahl, but “Right
now, our focus is Raspberry Pi as an embedded
platform because it can run Python and TFLite
without having to sacrifice much performance.”
You can adapt BirdNET to the platform of your
choice; it’s an open source project at github.com/
kahst/BirdNET-Analyzer.
Teach a Raspberry Pi to
identify 3,000 birds by
sound alone
Written by Keith Hammond
TIME REQUIRED:
Minutes
DIFFICULTY:
Easy
COST:
$20–$30
MATERIALS
» Raspberry Pi single-board computer running
Raspberry Pi OS Lite (64-bit); models 3
x
, 4, or
Zero 2 W
» USB microphone
Song
Spotter!
81
make.co
A
B
M82_081_BirdNetPi_F1.indd 81M82_081_BirdNetPi_F1.indd 81 7/11/22 4:17 PM7/11/22 4:17 PM
..................Content has been hidden....................
You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.