Arne Giacomo Munthe-Kaas · 2026-09-14 · notable
Fugleramme — an e-ink frame that names the birds it hears
Fugleramme is a Raspberry Pi picture frame that listens for birdsong, identifies the species with a local BirdNET-Go model, and redraws the birds on an e-ink panel as hand-cut 1800s illustrations. No cloud, MIT-licensed.
A Raspberry Pi frame that turns the birds singing outside your window into a 19th-century natural history plate.
Key specs
| GitHub stars | 2,169 |
|---|---|
| Hn points | 1,801 |
What is it?
Fugleramme pairs an always-on microphone with a 13.3-inch Inky Impression e-ink panel and repaints the display with whichever birds it just heard. The artwork is not generated: the project ships more than 800 cut-outs from public-domain natural history plates, covering over 400 species, with the best coverage across the Nordics, the British Isles and Germany. Arne Giacomo Munthe-Kaas released v0.21.3 on 14 September 2026 and the project reached the top of Hacker News the next day with 1,801 points.
How does it work?
Species identification runs on BirdNET-Go, the audio classifier from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Chemnitz University of Technology, entirely on the Raspberry Pi 5. Each detected species is matched to its illustration, background-removed, then packed onto a textured paper page with the larger birds placed toward the centre and sized by body mass. Because e-ink costs power only when it changes, the frame redraws only when the set of birds changes.
Why does it matter?
An always-on listener that never uploads audio is a good argument for small local models: the whole pipeline fits on a Raspberry Pi and keeps a live microphone off the internet. The e-ink panel is also optional — a web-only mode runs the same detection on other displays — so the code is a usable starting point for anyone building a quiet, offline sensing appliance.
Who is it for?
Raspberry Pi tinkerers and birdwatchers
Try it
docker run -d -p 8080:8080 -v fugleramme:/data ghcr.io/arnegiacomo/fugleramme