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Over the holidays I was building a wooden birdhouse with a Unifi Protect camera and a small web interface that automatically identifies the birds and shows me a
by dewey 10mo ago
Over the holidays I was building a wooden birdhouse with a Unifi Protect camera and a small web interface that automatically identifies the birds and shows me a simple overview over which type of bird visited how many times.
Birdhouse: https://img.notmyhostna.me/cRQ1gJfZCHjQKwFrgKQj https://img.notmyhostna.me/cRQ1gJfZCHjQKwFrgKQj
UI:
- https://img.notmyhostna.me/Hnw4qcvbg1ZQCrFxzGMn https://img.notmyhostna.me/Hnw4qcvbg1ZQCrFxzGMn
- https://img.notmyhostna.me/62TFwSXSRRbCfxDz297h https://img.notmyhostna.me/62TFwSXSRRbCfxDz297h
- https://img.notmyhostna.me/40qhgHmSqQsrGr8BC7Db https://img.notmyhostna.me/40qhgHmSqQsrGr8BC7Db
- https://img.notmyhostna.me/9bgz4GYsjQH33n3MtWKp https://img.notmyhostna.me/9bgz4GYsjQH33n3MtWKp (Face labeling, so I can show thumbnails of the actual birds that visited and train a ML model on it in the future)
- tintor 10mo agoThis is amazing
- adityaathalye 10mo ago"birdhomie" 10/10 naming skilz :)
- dewey 10mo agoThanks, it's named after a similar commercial project called Birdbuddy but I didn't want to pay for a subscription and potentially have some e-waste on my hands in a few years. I also wanted to have it integrated in my existing Unifi setup.
- adityaathalye 10mo agoAh yet another glorious yak shave... "Hacker refuses to pay for coercive subscription service which isn't even compatible with the home setup, and spends inordinate time and resources making the thing themselves.". I approve :)
- properbrew 10mo agoDidn't know this was a thing I needed. Love it!
- Tom1380 10mo agoAwesome!
- jftuga 10mo agoCool project. Do you have a repo for it?
- dewey 10mo agoI just made the repository public, it's in "works on my machine state" but happy to hear feedback! https://github.com/dewey/birdhomie https://github.com/dewey/birdhomie
- fiftyacorn 9mo agoReminds me of a joke i heard yesterday My wife said 'you look bored you should build a bird table' 'Now shes not speaking to me as she found out shes 5th on the list'
- thedevindevops 9mo agoFab job, did spark one question though, Re: face labeling, are you trying to to get a model to identify specific individuals of a species?
- dewey 9mo agoI've thought about it and it would make the whole project even cooler with actual stats of "birdhouse regulars" not just in aggregated form but I don't know if it's possible and if bird faces have enough unique features to differentiate them? Right now I only use it so that my thumbnails of pictures from the camera are centered on the head in the UI as I couldn't find a pre-existing model that does it for animals. I'm thinking that maybe having this data set of a few hundred bird faces will allow me to train a small one in the future to do it more automatically. If not...I at least learned something new about building models!
- arm32 9mo agoYou may appreciate this: https://alec.is/posts/unifi-g3-flex-bird-camera/ https://alec.is/posts/unifi-g3-flex-bird-camera/
- dewey 9mo agoIndeed, that was one of the posts I stumbled upon when I started building this. There's also another one which I found interesting (https://hawksley.org/2025/02/20/my-ubiquiti-unifi-protect-bird-nest-camera-setup.html https://hawksley.org/2025/02/20/my-ubiquiti-unifi-protect-bi...) as it documented the way to mod a G5 camera to set the focal length as someone on Reddit also documented before.