A Bird Microphone on the Balcony
I have a microphone listening for birds on my balcony. It’s connected to an Intel NUC running BirdNET-Go, which processes the audio and keeps track of what it thinks it heard. This is a fairly predictable project for me. Take something outside, attach a computer to it, and eventually start researching microphones that cost more than the thing I originally plugged in. The starting hardware was pretty modest: the NUC and a USB lavalier microphone. Enough to get audio into the system and start detecting birds. I used an AI assistant to help work through the configuration, inspect the machine, and figure out which parts were worth improving. That last question turned out to have several answers, depending on how far down the rabbit hole I wanted to go. ...