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Posted by arnemunthekaas 20 hours ago

Show HN: An e-ink frame that hears birds and draws them as 1800s illustrations(github.com)
See also: Avian Visitors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48343424 - May 2026 (20 comments)
1604 points | 202 comments
jadbox 13 hours ago|
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.
sydd 23 minutes ago||
Really cool, except the price. Around 500 Euro for the full thing... I miss the times you could make amazing things with a Pi under 100 Euro.
puzzlingcaptcha 2 minutes ago||
That's the e-ink monopoly for you. Though you could probably use a slightly smaller b&w eink display with a second hand raspberry 4 to shave a lot from that number.
hmartin 3 hours ago|||
Agree, this was really a beautiful thing to see!
fock 1 hour ago|||
EDIT: no Ai for pictures - cool!
pelican0 10 hours ago||
> 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?

seanwessmith 10 hours ago|||
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...

bezmi 9 hours ago||
I think the trend is probably misleading. A popular youtuber may have released a video in August with a title containing "in a minute".
scheme271 9 hours ago||||
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.
mrbombastic 7 hours ago||
people have been saying "it's been a minute" to mean a long time since at least the 90s in NY
palad1n 9 hours ago||||
Scarlett Johansson says, “See you in a minute" in Avengers: Endgame.
devindotcom 8 hours ago||||
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.
Carrok 8 hours ago|||
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

divbzero 15 hours ago||
The underlying classifier, BirdNET, is a traditional neural network and not an LLM:

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoinf.2021.101236

tuvix 14 hours ago||
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

lambda 11 hours ago|||
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

sbrother 4 hours ago||
Have you had any luck fine tuning one with musical data for classification or music-aware QA? I've been hacking on https://trebel.la/ which I would like to be a music practice companion, and the biggest missing feature is actually useful audio-based feedback pipeline.

My current approach, not yet validated, is trying to generate training data from masterclass recordings on Youtube, and then fine tuning MOSS-audio on a bunch of those. But I'm interested if there are better models, or large training sets I don't know about.

benob 13 hours ago|||
https://github.com/earthspecies/NatureLM-audio
bix6 12 hours ago||
More info please. Can I add this into birdnet go for more species detection?
rexxars 10 hours ago|||
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!
ada1981 11 hours ago||
Curious if there is a similar project for dog barks.
lacunary 4 hours ago||
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
drum998 6 minutes ago||
Awesome! I'm in the middle of setting up a birdnet system for audio recognition, and this is the puzzle piece my project needs!
mariusandra 23 minutes ago||
This is a very cool project!

When I first heard of it (through a community member in discord), I wanted to see if I could replicate it on FrameOS (my software for running anything on an e-ink panel), and sure enough, I got quite close: https://scenes.frameos.net/s/bird-field-journal

This is obviously nowhere as complicated as OP's project, but I thought I'd just share that your project inspired me to build something similar too.

joshstrange 18 hours ago||
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.

buffet_overflow 17 hours ago||
Years on a wall mounted eink screen sounds super interesting. What are you using for the power delivery/battery side of that setup?
joshstrange 17 hours ago||
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...

realcul 15 hours ago||
If I want a wifi e-ink connected display - curious what would you recommend. I want an e-ink display - that I can use as a sign/display board with wifi connectivity and remote administration.
joshstrange 14 hours ago||
If you want a simple e-ink wifi screen I'd point you at the reTerminal e1001 [0] if that size works for you. It's the easiest to get started with. You can either keep it on power or use the deep sleep to get more from the battery. It really comes down to how often you want to update it.

The BTLE boards have just crazy higher battery time with no need for deep sleep which is why I'm moving in that direction.

~7.5" is the size I've been buying so far, the larger e-ink screens get pricey but I can't wait for a calendar-sized one to come down in price such that I can frame it and hang it on the wall. Lastly I'd avoid the color e-ink screens unless you know you need color, won't need to refresh it often, and it's not in your eye line. Color refreshes take way longer (~30s in my experience for a 5-6 color screen) and the flashing it has to do is obnoxious. Monocolor displays take <2s normally and a single flash. I got a color screen first because "why not?" and I got color, but the refresh was too annoying so now it refreshes once a day in a place that I'm not when it refreshes so I don't have to see it.

I also recommend you check out OpenDisplay for what you will run on the device: https://opendisplay.org/index.html

[0] https://www.seeedstudio.com/reTerminal-E1001-p-6534.html

mikepurvis 12 hours ago|||
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.
joshstrange 12 hours ago||
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.

mikepurvis 7 hours ago||
Yeah no we're aligned; I have some raspis that I'm interested in doing long term battery stuff with (remote sensing and the like) and it definitely does seem like connectivity is the huge battery killer, like even if you wake up only periodically to take a reading or update an epaper display, the cost in battery just to negotiate a wifi connection and do tcpip and http things is awful.

And then you're stuck with a device that can only be communicated with when it chooses to wake up, whereas with BLE it seems you can listen for a remote OTA wake much more cheaply.

shaklee3 3 hours ago||
It only can last a couple weeks, so isn't really practical. Search for other e-ink calendar projects using the rpi zero
tranceylc 16 hours ago||
When it does run out, are you able to replace the battery? Or is it something way more painful than that?
joshstrange 16 hours ago||
It's a rechargeable battery, I just plug the board in (USB-C) and it charges the battery.
theturtletalks 16 hours ago||
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

bithammerthunde 16 hours ago|
Link missing?
shellfishgene 15 hours ago|||
Probably BirdNet, but Google also has an equivalent model now called Perch. https://birdnet.cornell.edu/
radiorental 15 hours ago|||
Complete guess but I wonder if it's the Merlin project?

https://www.birds.cornell.edu/home/merlin/

redbell 2 hours ago||
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://fugleramme.arnegiacomo.dev/ hoping for a live feed but it seems just a static image.

Kudos for the author and I hope we can see the next iteration!

_______________

1. I made an open-source laptop from scratch (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42797260)

2. I replaced a $120k bowling center system with $1,600 in ESP32s (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48968606)

3. A retro video game console I've been working on in my free time (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19393279)

thomasfl 15 hours ago||
As a fellow Norwegian I must say that this is pure art by the developer Arne Munthe-Kaas.
catapart 11 hours ago||
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.
bilsbie 11 hours ago|
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.

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