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Show HN: An e-ink frame that hears birds and draws them as 1800s illustrations

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Re: Show HN: An e-ink frame that hears birds and draws them as 1800s illustrations

#141

Post by dotancohen »

hnbad wrote: post #77
arnemunthekaas wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, I’ll do that, and ofc link to this beautiful poster I have that actually originally sparked the idea: https://www.axelthorenfeldt.com/news/wwf-verdens-naturfonds-...

Contrary to the Great Man version of how we mostly talk about history, scientific discoveries, technological breakthroughs and such have historically often occurred multiple times in multiple places often in close proximity time-wise but otherwise completely unrelated to each other. This of course makes sense if you consider that history seems to be primarily driven by material conditions (e.g. steam engines were kno…

  > Contrary to the Great Man version of how we mostly talk about history, scientific discoveries, technological breakthroughs and such have historically often occurred multiple times in multiple places often in close proximity time-wise but otherwise completely unrelated to each other.
My favourite example of this is calculus, followed closely by heavier-than-air flight.

Re: Show HN: An e-ink frame that hears birds and draws them as 1800s illustrations

#142

Post by jadbox »

This is the coolest thing on HN that I've seen in a minute. The whole thing is a perfect blend of ideas with the end result of something that feels... magical. Honestly this is the highest inspiration to me as a builder as I just want to create magical experiences, even if they are just small oddities.

Re: Show HN: An e-ink frame that hears birds and draws them as 1800s illustrations

#143

Post by dang »

jiwidi wrote: post #5

Isnt this a fork* of https://x.com/WarnerTeddy/status/2060018688645115964 ? https://github.com/Twarner491/AvianVisitors https://theodore.net/projects/AvianVisitors/ Or maybe im missing to see is the same author? It went viral a few months ago

Thanks! That one was discussed a few months ago:

Avian Visitors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48343424 - May 2026 (20 comments)

I've put a link to the earlier project in the toptext above.

Re: Show HN: An e-ink frame that hears birds and draws them as 1800s illustrations

#144

Post by xgulfie »

stetrain wrote: post #53
jdiff wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is "the new one"? The old one used AI, and this one seems to as well.

From the link: "Half the point of this project is showing off some amazing public-domain natural-history illustrations. Over 800 cut-outs covering more than 400 species, every one taken from a real plate and hand-curated for this project (no art is AI-generated, though some has been retouched with AI)."

Idk what "retouched with AI" means. Does it mean they used a segmentation model to cut out the shapes, or were they shoved through an imagegen and completely recreated?

Re: Show HN: An e-ink frame that hears birds and draws them as 1800s illustrations

#145

Post by mikepurvis »

joshstrange wrote: post #60

e-ink is so much fun, especially when combined with ESP32 or BTLE boards. I currently have 4 around my house displaying book quotes that I've highlighted in KOReader and they bring me joy each time I see them. They are simple and do one thing very well. I just got and setup a BTLE e-ink driver the other day and according to my calculations it will last _years_ on a single charge (2000mAh) even with multiple refreshes…

Thanks for speaking to the battery question; I'm very interested in how to run this kind of thing (the display portion at least) cordlessly too, especially when lipo pouches in that range are so dirt cheap.

Re: Show HN: An e-ink frame that hears birds and draws them as 1800s illustrations

#147

Post by bix6 »

benob wrote: post #131
tuvix wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any LLMs being widely used for audio classification? I know VLMs are being used a lot in image stuff. It always seems kind of silly to me to throw everything at an LLM. I know they’re huge and can automatically handle a huge number of tasks but something in me finds it wasteful when we could be creating easily trainable, cheap to run bespoke models for a lot of stuff

https://github.com/earthspecies/NatureLM-audio

More info please. Can I add this into birdnet go for more species detection?

Re: Show HN: An e-ink frame that hears birds and draws them as 1800s illustrations

#150

Post by joshstrange »

mikepurvis wrote: post #145
joshstrange wrote: post #60

e-ink is so much fun, especially when combined with ESP32 or BTLE boards. I currently have 4 around my house displaying book quotes that I've highlighted in KOReader and they bring me joy each time I see them. They are simple and do one thing very well. I just got and setup a BTLE e-ink driver the other day and according to my calculations it will last _years_ on a single charge (2000mAh) even with multiple refreshes…

Thanks for speaking to the battery question; I'm very interested in how to run this kind of thing (the display portion at least) cordlessly too, especially when lipo pouches in that range are so dirt cheap.

I might be misunderstanding your comment but the display is run/powered by the board so all you need to do is provide power to the board. For e-ink it uses no power to "hold" an image, only to write/refresh (sorry if I'm telling you something you already know!).

So reiterate, with a 2000mAh lipo battery I should be able to drive the board _and_ the screen for over 3 years if I only refresh it at most once every 4 hours (with "push" capabilities, I don't have to deep-sleep the board to get that battery life). At least, that's what the calculator says, I _just_ got my hardware to play with and so I can't speak from experience. Unfortunately my board is not charging the battery so I need to get a replacement which will probably take a week or two to get here.

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