fugleramme

fugleramme

Bird frame for Raspberry Pi or your homelab - real-time bird detection by audio, fully local AI, rendered as real, hand-cut 1800s bird illustrations. On an e-ink panel, a TV, or any screen.

Live demo: fugleramme.arnegiacomo.dev shows the birds heard in my garden in Bergen, Norway, right now. More frames around the world in the Showcase. Full docs: arnegiacomo.dev/fugleramme

Inspiration

A WWF Verdens naturfond poster by Axel Thorenfeldt hangs on my wall, and I wanted a version of it showing the actual birds in my garden. The idea of a live bird collage on an e-ink frame came from Teddy Warner’s AvianVisitors.

How it works

BirdNET-Go listens on a mic and identifies the birds. Fugleramme polls its API, matches each species to an illustration, packs them onto a page, and redraws only when the birds change - on an Inky Impression e-ink panel or any screen. An admin page lets you configure what to show, and the frame updates itself.

Full e-ink redraw (2x speed).

Already run BirdNET-Go? Point the frame at it, on the same machine or anywhere on your network.

No mic or few birds in your area? Point it at a public BirdWeather station instead - your own or anyone’s.

[!TIP] The e-ink panel on a Pi is what makes it a picture frame, but neither is required. Fugleramme also runs in a container on basically anything - a homelab, a NAS, an old laptop - and the page takes the shape of whatever shows it: a TV, an HDMI display, an external e-ink panel, any browser, or your desktop wallpaper. With BirdNET-Go, everything runs on your own hardware and works fully offline. See Container and Screens.

Hardware

A Raspberry Pi 5, an Inky Impression 13.3" or 7.3" (Spectra 6), a mic and an IKEA frame. Parts list and supported alternatives in Hardware, putting it together in Mounting.

I’m affiliated with Pimoroni - buying through the Pimoroni links or using the code ARNE at checkout supports this project.

Art

Half the point of this project is showing off some amazing public-domain natural-history illustrations. Nearly 1200 cut-outs covering over 650 species, every one taken from a real plate and hand-curated for this project (no art is AI-generated).

Each bird is sized by real body mass, the larger ones toward the centre, on a textured paper page.

Coverage is best across Europe and northern Asia, good in North America, and growing elsewhere. Pick your location in Species coverage to see which of your local birds are covered, or cut one yourself.

Species names in 40+ languages, see Languages.

No detections	A few visitors	A full garden

Install on a Raspberry Pi

On the Pi:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/arnegiacomo/fugleramme/main/install.sh | bash

It asks where BirdNET-Go should run and which ports to use, then installs everything and starts the frame as a service. A fresh system usually needs a reboot. Starting from a blank SD card? See the install guide.

Run in a container

docker run -d -p 8080:8080 -v fugleramme:/data \
  -e FUGLERAMME_DETECTOR_URL=http://birdnet.local:8080 \
  ghcr.io/arnegiacomo/fugleramme

Kiosk on :8080, admin on :8080/admin, everything it persists in /data.

On a Linux box with a USB mic, this brings up BirdNET-Go alongside it:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/arnegiacomo/fugleramme/main/examples/docker-compose.yml -o docker-compose.yml
docker compose up -d

See Container for more info.

Run on Proxmox

On the Proxmox host’s shell:

bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dmellok/proxmox-fugleramme/main/ct/fugleramme.sh)"

See Proxmox for more info.

On other devices

Like building your own stuff, or got old hardware gathering dust? Fugleramme serves its page over HTTP, so almost anything with a screen and a network connection can show your birds. Hang a battery-powered e-ink frame anywhere in Wi-Fi range, with no wires, or give an old e-reader a second life.

fugleramme/clients collects programs and setups for other devices, made by the community. Got Fugleramme running on something cool? Share it there!

Run locally (for development)

uv sync                                       # set up venv
uv run fugleramme-fake-detector               # stand-in BirdNET-Go on :8090
uv run fugleramme-dev                         # start service on :8080 with hot-reload

The fake detector’s flags, and working against a real station instead: Running it without a Pi.

Contributing

Contributions are very welcome - fixes, docs and artwork most of all. Thanks to everyone who has contributed and sponsored so far ❤️

Want to help?

• Something is broken - a bug report
• A question, an idea, or a frame you have built - the FAQ first, then Discussions
• A fix, a doc change, or a bird you have cut - open a PR, no issue needed
• Don’t know where to start - the good first issues

See Contributing for more info. For anything else, you can reach me through arnegiacomo.dev.

Similar projects

• AvianVisitors - the original live bird collage, on BirdNET-Pi with AI-generated illustrations, also sold as kits
• inky-bird - BirdNET, field-journal illustrations on an Inky panel
• HABirdDashboard - BirdNET-Go, a collage card for Home Assistant
• belkins-birdnet - BirdNET-Pi, AI-generated kachō-e style illustrations
• featherframe - BirdNET-Pi, Audubon plates on an ESP32 e-ink panel
• birdframe - BirdNET-Go, several art styles on a Samsung Frame TV
• Backyard Birds - BirdNET-Go, natural-history plates as a Tesserae widget for several e-ink panels

Fugleramme shares no code or art with them.

Built on fugleramme

• tesserae-widget-fugleramme - fugleramme modes and art as a widget for Tesserae
• fugleramme-samsung-frame - sends the collage to a Samsung Frame TV in Art Mode
• birdframe - the collage in greyscale on a QuirkLogic Papyr 13.3" e-ink tablet
• birdsong - the classic artwork as one plate of the birds heard, sized by calls, with a card for each bird
• Cobalt Birds - the collage on a Kobo e-reader running Cobalt

License

• Code: MIT - see LICENSE.
• Detection (BirdNET-Go, installed separately as a container): CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, non-commercial only. BirdNET model by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Chemnitz University of Technology, taxonomy data powered by eBird.org.
• Bird images: each style folder carries its own terms and sources, and its manifest links the plate every file was cut from. classic is CC BY-SA 4.0 - see assets/artwork/classic/ATTRIBUTION.md.
• Label fonts (assets/fonts/): SIL OFL 1.1 - see assets/fonts/ATTRIBUTION.md.
• Bird sizes (assets/bird_sizes.csv): body mass from AVONET (Tobias et al. 2022, Ecology Letters, doi:10.1111/ele.13898), CC BY 4.0.
• BirdNET scientific-name aliases (assets/birdnet_aliases.json): OpenFauna’s compiled taxonomic alias map, CC BY-SA 4.0 - see assets/ATTRIBUTION.md.
• Kiosk icons (src/fugleramme/web/static/): cut from a von Wright plate, CC BY-SA 4.0 - see assets/ATTRIBUTION.md.
• Docs search (docs/assets/fuse.min.js): Fuse.js by Kiro Risk, Apache 2.0.