I turned my security cameras into an automatic bird identification system • Hacker News Board

Re: I turned my security cameras into an automatic bird identification system

#191

Post by brewtide » Tue, Sep 01, 2026, 11:43 PM UTC

maciejb wrote: post #118

brewtide wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I built an esp32 with 48khz mic soldered on, feeding rtsp stream to server in living room. Works amazing. Need to build more mics.

How do you transmit the audio once captured?

It's RTSP, just the audio. My 1/2 acre has wifi coverage everywhere (Uni-fi is really nice, honestly) so it just streams across the wi-fi.

Re: I turned my security cameras into an automatic bird identification system

#192

Post by stirfish » Wed, Sep 02, 2026, 2:32 AM UTC

sahn44 wrote: post #187

boringg wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

whats the spend roughly on an ongoing basis?

I had been using gemma-4-31B-it llm for cost/accuracy and it was super cheap, about $0.65/month. I had also downscaled the size and back tested on bird/no-bird images from my camera. But, then I noticed that it was missing birds that were at the back of the pool and I needed to use higher resolution and better models and cost went up 10x. Now, it's to high for my liking and I need to do more model testing to get it d…

I'm curious if you could free yourself of the ongoing llm cost by using YOLOv8 or opencv or something like that

Re: I turned my security cameras into an automatic bird identification system

#193

Post by beredon » Wed, Sep 02, 2026, 4:47 AM UTC

[dead]

Re: I turned my security cameras into an automatic bird identification system

#194

Post by lemmelearn » Wed, Sep 02, 2026, 10:27 AM UTC

twhitely wrote: post #113

sciencesama wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just use trmnl it will make it super easy

I like my money to not go towards transphobes

i suspect ur talking about the founder ryan ckulp which is very active in his reddit /r/trmnl but cant seem to find any proof of transphobic stance

Re: I turned my security cameras into an automatic bird identification system

#195

Post by lemmelearn » Wed, Sep 02, 2026, 10:29 AM UTC

twhitely wrote: post #113

sciencesama wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just use trmnl it will make it super easy

I like my money to not go towards transphobes

is there proof? i see that the founder ryan ckulp is active in /r/trmnl but dont see any proof of being misogyn or transphobe

Re: I turned my security cameras into an automatic bird identification system

#196

Post by sahn44 » Wed, Sep 02, 2026, 3:32 PM UTC

stirfish wrote: post #192

sahn44 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had been using gemma-4-31B-it llm for cost/accuracy and it was super cheap, about $0.65/month. I had also downscaled the size and back tested on bird/no-bird images from my camera. But, then I noticed that it was missing birds that were at the back of the pool and I needed to use higher resolution and better models and cost went up 10x. Now, it's to high for my liking and I need to do more model testing to get it d…

I'm curious if you could free yourself of the ongoing llm cost by using YOLOv8 or opencv or something like that

My sense has been that accuracy that I need is only possible with the pretty advanced AI models and that OpenCV type approach wouldn't be good enough. Birds are pretty small in the image of the overall pool that I am working with and discerning them accurately is hard. I think it would be possible for other use cases and basically depends on the image source you are working with and the difficulty of detection within that image.

If you had, say, a camera on the inside of a birdhouse and the whole scene was either empty of taken up by a bird, then that would be easy for an on-device model.

Re: I turned my security cameras into an automatic bird identification system

#197

Post by stirfish » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 4:29 PM UTC

sahn44 wrote: post #196

stirfish wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious if you could free yourself of the ongoing llm cost by using YOLOv8 or opencv or something like that

My sense has been that accuracy that I need is only possible with the pretty advanced AI models and that OpenCV type approach wouldn't be good enough. Birds are pretty small in the image of the overall pool that I am working with and discerning them accurately is hard. I think it would be possible for other use cases and basically depends on the image source you are working with and the difficulty of detection within…

I'm seeing some pretty cool projects for bird detection with YOLO online. They may do more than you need; you probably don't care about the kind of bird, right?

Maybe it would be worth it to spend a few tokens on an implementation, just to try!