A thin lavalier microphone pokes out from under the eaves of a house in Bergen, Norway, its cable running back through a closed window. Somewhere inside, a picture frame on the wall quietly redraws itself: a chaffinch fades in beside a blackbird, because both of them were singing in the garden ten minutes ago.
That frame is Fugleramme, built by Arne Giacomo Munthe-Kaas. Instead of showing bird detections as a list of species names on a dashboard, it turns them into a collage of natural-history illustrations that changes as the garden changes. His installation has logged roughly 2,600 detections across 37 species so far. When nothing is calling outside, the frame falls back to a drawing of an empty perch.
What is actually behind the glass
The recommended build is a Raspberry Pi 5 with 2 GB of RAM, a Pimoroni Inky Impression 13.3-inch Spectra 6 E Ink panel, and a USB microphone (he uses a Boya BY-M3). The Inky drives over SPI on the Pi's 40-pin GPIO header, and Pimoroni's Python library handles the refresh, so there is no soldering in this build at all. The panel is 1600 x 1200 and physically A4, which is why it drops straight into a standard IKEA RODALM frame with the Pi mounted behind it. One detail worth copying: he left the back open and fitted an active cooler, because BirdNET inference runs continuously and keeps the Pi warm all day.
How the software stack fits together
BirdNET-Go (https://github.com/tphakala/birdnet-go) does the listening and classification, and it all runs on the Pi with no cloud round trip. Fugleramme sits on top of it and polls the BirdNET-Go API for recent detections, matches each species to artwork, lays out the collage, and pushes a new frame to the display only when the lineup changes. That last part is the gotcha of any E Ink project: a full refresh takes seconds and flashes the panel, so you redraw on change, not on a timer. The art took the real patience: public-domain plates from the 1800s, each bird cut out by hand, given a transparent background, and dropped onto a paper texture. Larger birds get pulled toward the middle by body mass. Coverage is strongest for Northern Europe, with North American species listed as next up.
Worth stealing for a thesis build
The E Ink panel is optional. Fugleramme serves the same view over HTTP, so you can prototype on an HDMI monitor or a phone before spending on a Spectra 6 panel. That makes it a sensible capstone shape: get BirdNET-Go classifying from a USB mic first, confirm your species list looks sane over a week, then add the display. Full write-up is at Hackster. If detections stop the moment you plug the display in, check your USB port allocation before you blame the classifier.
Originally published on blog.circuit.rocks.
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