I did exactly this with BirdNet-Go and my Unifi doorbell cam. Unifi exposes an RTSP feed for each camera so it was easy for the tool to just "listen" to the doorbell and start classifying.
I have a spare e-ink display and my next weekend project to follow onto this is to wire it up so it shows some faux "woodcut" images of birds detected, or something like that.
ben1040
Btw, Merlin Bird ID app by Cornell University is so good that I got some people interested that weren't into that topic at all.
comboy
I tried that with my Aqara camera. The mic there has no windshield, though; wind noise was terrible. Also I couldn’t get Aqara support to enable higher sampling rates in the firmware than 16kHz; BirdNET expects 48kHz audio samples.
Ended up installing a better microphone attached to a RPi3A+ and using a RaspberyPi 4 which I already owned for hosting BirdNET-Go
https://maciejb.me/posts/birdnet-go-setup/
Much better sound quality now!
maciejb
Heads up. I noticed the screenshot of your markdown card has an ASCII block that goes below the baseline. `U+2588` (Full block) tends to do that depending on a lot of things.
I made a change to the markdown card sometime ago that uses only `U+2581` through `U+ 2587` instead to avoid that issue.
Nice! I never thought about using my security cameras but ended up building a regular Birdnet-Pi with a microphone. I took it one step further to make it portable so that I can use it when we hike or travel to new places. Added a little e-ink display to the front and it allows me to see Top 3 for the day, last detected, and total number for the day.
I run BirdNET-Go as an app on my Home Assistant i7 M710q. I use the GPU-enabled BirdNET model and Perch V2, and it works swimmingly.
Input is three RTSP streams from various Reolink PoE cameras around our house, and it is pretty cool to be able to find and listen to the birds/frogs that come.
inventor7777
Nice! I've tried to build something similar with Unifi cameras (https://github.com/dewey/birdhomie) and it worked pretty well, the species detection wasn't that accurate but I'll continue on that project in the winter.
dewey
I just turned my PTZ security camera into a VAR booth for my kid. Lawn (soccer) / Driveway (Floorball) / End. Live view, step back 10s, slowmo, frame step, scrubbing.
GLM 5.3 helped to root my camera so I could get proper endpoints for PTZ and stream. Claude built the api and frontend, hosted on Home Assistant.
comments (10)
I have a spare e-ink display and my next weekend project to follow onto this is to wire it up so it shows some faux "woodcut" images of birds detected, or something like that.
ben1040
comboy
Ended up installing a better microphone attached to a RPi3A+ and using a RaspberyPi 4 which I already owned for hosting BirdNET-Go https://maciejb.me/posts/birdnet-go-setup/
Much better sound quality now!
maciejb
I made a change to the markdown card sometime ago that uses only `U+2581` through `U+ 2587` instead to avoid that issue.
It's under a collapsed block here:
https://www.kyleniewiada.org/blog/2025/05/backyard-bird-trac...
KyleWasTaken
Case I used to make it portable and fit the display https://makerworld.com/en/models/1336154-portable-pi-sdr-cas...
tacodestroyer
alansaber
Input is three RTSP streams from various Reolink PoE cameras around our house, and it is pretty cool to be able to find and listen to the birds/frogs that come.
inventor7777
dewey
GLM 5.3 helped to root my camera so I could get proper endpoints for PTZ and stream. Claude built the api and frontend, hosted on Home Assistant.
entrep
taylorbuley