{"slug": "track-bird-visitors-with-a-raspberry-pi-and-a-usb-mic", "title": "Track Bird Visitors With a Raspberry Pi and a USB Mic", "summary": "Teddy Warner's Avian Visitors project uses a Raspberry Pi and USB microphone with Cornell's BirdNET deep learning classifier to identify and track bird species by sound, displaying recent visitors as a collage on a web interface or an optional E-Ink panel. The system recognizes more than 11,000 species and can send detection data to Home Assistant or MQTT for automation.", "body_md": "[Avian Visitors](https://theodore.net/projects/AvianVisitors/) is a lovely project by [Teddy Warner] that uses a Raspberry Pi and microphone to keep track of which birds have been visiting your home, and creates a colorful illustration of recent visitors on top of it all.\n\nIt reports on a web interface of its own making, but what really takes things to a new level is an optional, stylish E-Ink panel that shows the last 24 hours’ worth of visitors at a glance in a collage.\n\n[The key to identification is ](https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/BirdNET-system-2-thumb.png)[BirdNET](https://birdnet.cornell.edu/) (GitHub [here](https://github.com/birdnet-team)), a deep learning classifier from Cornell that can reliably identify and classify more than 11,000 species worldwide based on sound alone.\n\nBased on that information, the system pulls bird images from a reference set for the region and creates a collage representing the breadth and frequency of visitors in a single image. The larger the image of a bird, the more frequently it was heard.\n\nThat’s a cool project, but [Teddy] took things one step further by setting up a color E-Ink display to show a running summary of all the avian visitors the system identifies. [Teddy] has a knack for leveraging projects into wall-mounted art, as we saw with his [generative art wall plotter](https://hackaday.com/2026/02/11/diy-wall-plotter-does-generative-art-but-not-as-we-know-it/).\n\nGot ideas of your own? Avian Visitors even has options for sending the latest detection to Home Assistant or over MQTT, allowing automation triggers based on specific bird species. If you decide to try it out and put your own spin on it, be sure to let us know by [sending us a tip](https://hackaday.com/submit-a-tip/)!\n\nThe [GitHub repository](https://github.com/Twarner491/AvianVisitors) for Avian Visitors has everything you need to get set up, and the basic system needs little more than a Raspberry Pi and a USB microphone. There’s a build video embedded just below, so give it a shot if you want to get a better idea of what birds come visiting.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/track-bird-visitors-with-a-raspberry-pi-and-a-usb-mic", "canonical_source": "https://hackaday.com/2026/08/08/track-bird-visitors-with-a-raspberry-pi-and-a-usb-mic/", "published_at": "2026-08-08 23:00:53+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-09 12:41:47.633987+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["machine-learning", "artificial-intelligence", "ai-products"], "entities": ["Teddy Warner", "Raspberry Pi", "BirdNET", "Cornell University", "Home Assistant", "MQTT", "Avian Visitors"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/track-bird-visitors-with-a-raspberry-pi-and-a-usb-mic", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/track-bird-visitors-with-a-raspberry-pi-and-a-usb-mic.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/track-bird-visitors-with-a-raspberry-pi-and-a-usb-mic.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/track-bird-visitors-with-a-raspberry-pi-and-a-usb-mic.jsonld"}}