This lovely Raspberry Pi e-ink project shows you birds that have been spotted in your area

Do you know what kinds of birds live in your area? If not, it's surprisingly easy to find out these days. You don't even need to leave your seat, as there are plenty of resources out there for bird watchers to log and share sightings where you live.

If you like the idea of seeing everything around you but'd rather do so from the comfort of your own home, this cool Raspberry Pi project uses all that bird-sighting data to generate images of species seen near you. Best of all, it does so on a lovely e-ink display, so it looks like an actual hand-drawn image from a distance.

The Inky Bird Frame keeps its eyes on the skies so you don't have to

It even makes lovely art

Over on the Raspberry Pi subreddit, user veteranbv explained how the Inky Bird Frame works. They said it originated from three things they like coming together: "birding, field-journal illustration, and running things in my homelab." The end result is a cool-looking image of the surrounding birds, generated using live data.

Veteranbv explains that it uses two Pis: a Pi Zero 2 W for the display, and a Pi 4 for the controller. Every so often, the controller will visit the iNaturalist website to look for birds spotted near you. You can tell the controller how far from your house you want it to check, and you can also set a time window so that previously seen birds will still appear.

Every time the system detects a new species that it hasn't logged yet, it begins trawling through licensed reference photographs of the bird. It then feeds that into Codex, generates a 'plate' of the bird in a field-journal art style, double-checks that everything looks good and accurate, and then adds it to your collection of birds. The Inky Bird Frame will then begin cycling through all the birds identified in your designated area, reusing the plates as needed.

If this sounds like something you'd like to make, head over to the Inky Bird Frame GitHub page for instructions.