Fugleramme: an e-ink frame that hears birds and draws them

The frame hangs on a kitchen windowsill in Bergen. It hears birds through a microphone, names them with a local network, and paints them onto an e-ink panel as 1800s illustrations. No cloud, no account, no subscription. Everything runs on a Raspberry Pi.

The look came from a WWF poster by Axel Thorenfeldt that hung on the builder's wall. He wanted that poster showing the actual birds in his garden. So he wired a Pi 5 to an Inky Impression panel and let BirdNET-Go do the listening.

BirdNET-Go runs the classifier locally. Fugleramme polls its API, matches each species to an illustration, packs the birds onto a textured paper page, and redraws only when the lineup changes. Larger birds sit toward the centre, sized by body mass. An empty window shows a bare perch.

The art is the second half of the project. More than 800 cut-outs cover over 400 species, every one lifted from a real natural-history plate and hand-curated for the project. No illustration is AI-generated, though a few were retouched with AI. Coverage is strongest for Scandinavia, the British Isles and central Europe; the rest of the world is on the way.

It is early development. Expect the odd bug and unpolished edges. The live demo has been running from that kitchen window since launch, and the Show HN thread picked up more than two thousand points in its first day.

Build one from the parts list, or point it at an existing BirdNET-Go install and use it web-only. https://github.com/arnegiacomo/fugleramme

■ Filed from The Bestiary: the Animals, Earth wing of the city.