The Birds Outside, Drawn For You Automatically

A new e-paper display project by [arnegiacomo] uses a Raspberry Pi 5 and BirdNet-Go, an AI-powered birdsong classifier, to automatically draw pictures of birds heard outside in real time, assembling images from 19th-century bird guides into a collage. The project, located in Norway, showcases a creative application of machine classification and is available on GitHub.

With artificial intelligence being the bête noir of the moment, there are some projects using it which maybe don’t bring much to the table. So it’s nice to see one that uses it in a creative way, and delivers something new. arnegiacomo ’s e-paper screen is a great example, as it draws a picture in real time of whatever birds are outside https://github.com/arnegiacomo/fugleramme . Behind the quite large screen sits a Raspberry Pi 5, and on that is BirdNet-Go https://github.com/tphakala/birdnet-go , an AI-powered birdsong classifier. A USB microphone catches the birdsong, and Birdnet comes up with the species. The birds on the display are then those species as pictures from 19th century bird spotters guides, assembled into a collage. You can even see what the current set of birds it hears are https://fugleramme.arnegiacomo.dev , live, and they are a representative cross section of the European birds you’d find in Norway where it’s located. We like this project, both for the bird book vibe it gives, and the creative use of machine classification. Surprisingly this isn’t the first project in this field we have seen over the years https://hackaday.com/2025/11/25/a-bird-watching-assistant/ .