Products > Crowd Funded Projects

BirdWeather PUC

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Halcyon:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/scribelabs/birdweather-puc

This is a project I have been involved with for quite some time and I have also backed their Kickstarter campaign.

Basically, I've been running BirdNET on a Raspberry Pi which uses a microphone to identify birds via their calls. It's pretty damn accurate and has been producing great results for many months. It seems they did initially release a small number of PUCs but these have been unavailable until now.

https://app.birdweather.com is the actual platform where you can view aggregated data.

thm_w:
How hard was it to setup on the raspi and what mic did you use?

They previously worked on this gait tracker: https://runscribe.com/
So should have the experience.


--- Quote ---With WiFi active, uploading every soundscape, PUC runs under 0.5W.
--- End quote ---


--- Quote ---In addition to its stereo microphones, PUC is also packed with environmental sensors, including (Temp, Humidity, Pressure, Air Quality, tVOC, CO2, and a Spectral Light Sensor) so you're able to track local weather conditions.
--- End quote ---

Halcyon:
Super easy to set up. I followed these instructions: https://github.com/mcguirepr89/BirdNET-Pi/wiki/Installation-Guide

At the moment I'm using a Focusrite USB audio interface with a Rode shotgun mic. It works extremely well, but it was only ever going to be a temporary solution while testing. It's outdoors, but mostly protected from the elements as none of the gear is designed to work in the wet. I'd like to get a more permanent solution that can be left outside in the rain (hence backing the BirdWeather PUC project). I could build my own custom solution with weatherproof enclosures, solar panels etc... but I don't really have the time.

If you are going to use a Raspberry Pi, I would suggest going with one of the later models. I'm using an RPi 4B with 8 GB RAM and it works extremely well. I tested it with an older model with half the RAM and found that it was having trouble keeping up with processing the data coming in and was resorting to using the swap partition (also the CPU was almost always maxed out). With my current setup, it's not using swap at all and is more than enough to keep up with realtime processing. I've attached some stats from the web GUI.

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