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

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221–230 of 266 posts

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

#222
post #220
post #142

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.

Really cool, except the price. Around 500 Euro for the full thing... I miss the times you could make amazing things with a Pi under 100 Euro.

That's the e-ink monopoly for you. Though you could probably use a slightly smaller b&w eink display with a second hand raspberry 4 to shave a lot from that number.

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

#225
post #126

The underlying classifier, BirdNET, is a traditional neural network and not an LLM: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoinf.2021.101236

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

wav2vec or similar approaches are used a lot these days, which is basically BERT with audio inputs. Whether that counts as an LLM or not, I am not sure. It's a transformer architecture in any case.

People will often reach for "easily trainable, cheap" solutions when they can; the reason people reach for Transformers and LLMs is because when you throw more data at them, they get better.

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

#229

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…

For hanging as art, just found this https://github.com/dmellok/el133-pico-driver

Uses a native C driver instead of python so you can run the display off a battery as it's more efficient.

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

#230
post #56

Frigate, the IP camera security system, also does bird classification: https://docs.frigate.video/configuration/bird_classification...

Thanks for sharing. Didn’t know about this project. Have you used it yourself? I’ve only experimented with Scrypted for fun, but Frigate sounds like I could operate birdsong analysis without a separate BirdNET container.

I have Bird Classification enabled in the settings, but so far haven't seen any labelled (it's only been a few days). Similarly with Face Recognition, I've only seen false positives. It does reliably detect people though (300 tracked so far). I'll have to experiment with settings such as confidence score.
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