4 ms·

The most interesting bit here to me isn’t the $5 or the DIY, it’s that this is quietly the opposite of how we usually “do” sensing in 2025. Most bioacoustics w

The most interesting bit here to me isn’t the $5 or the DIY, it’s that this is quietly the opposite of how we usually “do” sensing in 2025. Most bioacoustics work now is: deploy a recorder, stream terabytes to the cloud, let a model find “whale = 0.93” segments, and then maybe a human listens to 3 curated clips in a slide deck. The goal is classification, not experience. The machines get the hours-long immersion that Roger Payne needed to even notice there was such a thing as a song, and humans get a CSV of detections. A $5 hydrophone you built yourself flips that stack. You’re not going to run a transformer on it in real time, you’re going to plug it into a laptop or phone and just…listen. Long, boring, context-rich listening, exactly the thing the original discovery came from and that our current tooling optimizes away as “inefficient”. If this stuff ever scales, I could imagine two very different futures: one is “citizen-science sensor network feeding central ML pipelines”, the other is “cheap instruments that make it normal to treat soundscapes as part of your lived environment”. The first is useful for papers. The second actually changes what people think the ocean is. The $5 is important because it makes the second option plausible. You don’t form a relationship with a black-box $2,000 research hydrophone you’re scared to break. You do with something you built, dunked in a koi pond, and used to hear “fish kisses”. That’s the kind of interface that quietly rewires people’s intuitions about non-human worlds in a way no spectrogram ever will.

jasonjayr 10mo ago
Cheap sensors, used by many, is how we get more reproducability, more citizen science, and more understanding of the world around us. RTL-SDR is another area where this there is so much to see 'hidden' in electromagnetic radio frequency space.
zimpenfish 10mo ago
> You’re not going to run a transformer on it in real time Why not? You can run BirdNET's model live in your browser[0]. Listen live and let the machine do the hard work of finding interesting bits[1] for later. [0] https://birdnet-team.github.io/real-time-pwa/about/ https://birdnet-team.github.io/real-time-pwa/about/ [1] Including bits that you may have missed, obvs.
- chankstein38 10mo ago
  This is what I was going to say. My whole goal when setting up sensing projects is to eventually get it to a point that I can automate it. And I'm just a DIY dude in his house. I've been working on the detection of cars through vibrations detected by dual MPUs resonating through my house. I don't mean to imply I've had great success. I can see the pattern of an approaching car but I'm struggling to get it recognized as a car reliably and to not overcount. But yeah, totally been doing projects like this for a long time lol not sure why OP implies you wouldn't do that. First thing I thought was "Oh man I want to put it in the lake near me and see if I can't get it detecting fish or something!"
  - zimpenfish 10mo ago
    > First thing I thought was "Oh man I want to put it in the lake near me and see if I can't get it detecting fish or something!" Same. Although my first effort with my hydrophone (in my parents pond) was stymied because they live on a main road and all I picked up was car vibrations. Maybe that's your solution - get a fish tank/pond and hydrophone!

jasonjayr 10mo ago

Cheap sensors, used by many, is how we get more reproducability, more citizen science, and more understanding of the world around us. RTL-SDR is another area where this there is so much to see 'hidden' in electromagnetic radio frequency space.

zimpenfish 10mo ago

> You’re not going to run a transformer on it in real time Why not? You can run BirdNET's model live in your browser[0]. Listen live and let the machine do the hard work of finding interesting bits[1] for later. [0] https://birdnet-team.github.io/real-time-pwa/about/ https://birdnet-team.github.io/real-time-pwa/about/ [1] Including bits that you may have missed, obvs.

chankstein38 10mo ago
This is what I was going to say. My whole goal when setting up sensing projects is to eventually get it to a point that I can automate it. And I'm just a DIY dude in his house. I've been working on the detection of cars through vibrations detected by dual MPUs resonating through my house. I don't mean to imply I've had great success. I can see the pattern of an approaching car but I'm struggling to get it recognized as a car reliably and to not overcount. But yeah, totally been doing projects like this for a long time lol not sure why OP implies you wouldn't do that. First thing I thought was "Oh man I want to put it in the lake near me and see if I can't get it detecting fish or something!"
- zimpenfish 10mo ago
  > First thing I thought was "Oh man I want to put it in the lake near me and see if I can't get it detecting fish or something!" Same. Although my first effort with my hydrophone (in my parents pond) was stymied because they live on a main road and all I picked up was car vibrations. Maybe that's your solution - get a fish tank/pond and hydrophone!