Declan's Blog

This is a csv dump of the BirdNetPi that’s been running in my backyard for over a year. I tweaked the lat log slightly to point to a local park so I don’t totally DOX myself.

Download the file below.

There are over 50k entries. The top line has the column labels. The last column refers to a file name of the sound file used to test. I have a lot of these, but the system is set up to clear them when the hard drive fills, so I’ve lost some of them. I still have a ton tho, not sure what to do with them! 😉

I often get false positives on the BirdNetPi, usually it’s a leaf blower that it thinks is a Turkey Vulture – so I don’t get too excited when I see a weird new bird name for the first time. Combine that with a midnight timeframe, and I was skeptical…

What in the world??? It kinda sounds like geese…? Maybe a loud skunk fight?

Huh, no, that’s geesy! I mentioned it to another birdish friend, and she was convinced she’d heard geese late last night too!

So, here’s what a Greater White Fronted Goose looks like (wikipedia):

And here are their migration paths, one of which looks like it could come over San Diego!

Looks like the device caught them passing over. Here are the other 5 sound clips that were captured:

This is a dump from the database. Started 5/23/22 thru 7/12/22. I suspect a number of the single detections are false, like the Turkey Vulture seems to come up when the mic hears a leaf blower.

I’ve been messing with a new project to listen to the bird calls in the yard and identify them using Machine Learning. I found this project:

https://birdnetpi.com/

And I built it out:

The microphone choice was painful! The advice on the site is to get a Clippy – a UK manufactured omni-directional mic. After ordering that, then a comedy of adapters, I found that the UGreen USB Audio adapter that I got would not show up as a recording device on the Raspberry Pi. So I punted, googled around for similar projects, and saw people liking this Samson USB mic that has adjustment for close or omni sound.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001R76D42?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details&th=1

And it works! Here’s one day’s data:

I didn’t fire it up til right before work at 8a, so I’ll see if there are more morning captures tomorrow. Interesting how it all goes quiet when the sun goes down.

It’s fun to watch the running log. The software does 15 second sound captures, then runs that sample through the embedded BirdNet machine learning model that contains over 3000 songs. It calculates the confidence level, and anything over .7 gets added to the database.

We knew the crows were loud and seemed to show up at certain times, now it’s documented! 😉

Things to mess with now:

Weatherproof the setup, but don’t block the mic.

Try other placements in the yard for more songs, maybe set up bird feeder closeby.

Understand how the machine learning model was built and is used.

Add other sounds to the model, especially the jet sounds as they pass – perhaps identifying type of jet?

See if the Clippy would be a better mic. Have to figure out the mess of adapters I got to make it connect. Also have to get a proper USB Audio recording device – UGreen looked right from the Birdnet site, but I may have gotten the wrong one.

UPDATE: added a full day chart:

Downtown San Diego beer places:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1BBt2TpOygu9HFfKKALkivkF1YO51psrB&usp=sharing

30th St (close to downtown) beer and food places

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1t97XHwB9wFPneKURat46i-hF5hE&usp=sharing

Foodie friends’ recommendations for great restaurants and their favorite dishes:

https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/edit?hl=en&mid=154cR3_581NqevYbPXC7eMS67P7AF_xdN&ll=32.863881721138185%2C-117.10693975000004&z=10

I want to try an experiment.  It might end up as a mess, but that’s why we experiment.  I’d like to try to enable a social circle using Slack.  This post got me thinking about trying this:

http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/18/9349425/slack-future-of-conferences-xoxo-festival

Mostly the parts about getting people talking before and during a conference.  Why can’t we do that for an ongoing social circle?  So, I created:

https://socializing.slack.com

When I say social, I mean joking around, event planning like parties, happy hours, bottle shares, and general get-togethers.  I bet other things happen too, but that’s part of the experiment.  I’m kind of trying to get that early Twitter vibe where we all met new people and got together for random stuff and had fun.

To sign up, go to this Google Form and add an email address and you’ll get an invite from Slack:

http://goo.gl/forms/TDQbf6ZiJu

It’ll be interesting to see how this works out, or doesn’t 😉  We’re getting a LOT of utility out of Slack at work and in some community forums so I hope it works for this too.

I was visiting my buddies Rebecca and Chip in STL and he said he was working on a making a timelapse device with a RaspberryPi.  This got me inspired, so I built one too.

Parts:

RaspberryPi v2

Camera Kit for RaspberryPi

The camera kit is just a floppy ribbon cable with the camera on the end of it, so it’s hard to position.  I looked on Thingiverse.com to see if anyone had created a RaspberriPi case with a camera holder that I could 3D print.  I didn’t find exactly what I was envisioning, but I did come across this:

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:162594

RaspberryPi Camera Holder that slots into the Ethernet port

It’s a really cool little arm made up of 3 pieces that you connect with 2 screws.  The arm holds the camera at one end, and sticks into the Ethernet connector at the other end – no electronics, it just is the right shape to fit nicely and stay put.

Here’s my little rig:

I had it in a box case, but I dropped it and it broke 😉  I need to get another one somewhere, or 3D print one.

Now that I had the physical setup done, I followed this blog post to set up the software:

Simple timelapse camera using Raspberry Pi and a coffee tin

The same author has a great post on using an app called BerryCam to help setup where the camera is pointed:

BerryCam – Use your iPad and iPhone to control your Raspberry Pi camera

The author goes further and gets the whole device stuffed into a coffee can with a battery pack, which I’ll get around to at some point.

I modified the python script so it names the captured files sequentially by date and time rather that the default setup.  I found this a lot easier to work with when I wanted to stuff the pictures into a timelapse video.

Now, the SD card on the RaspberryPi I have is only 8G, so it’ll fill up if I don’t drain it, so I rsync the files off to another, bigger machine once an hour with a cronjob.  I had to learn the “–remove-source-files” rsync switch and that helped a ton.

At first, I just wanted the timelapser to watch out toward the West and capture the clouds and sunset:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DplUSQ3jJlw

Then I had to idea to stick a dish of birdseed out in front of the camera to see what would happen, and I got some really neat pictures of local birds!

More pix here:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/bigdpix/sets/72157644050932461/

Here’s how I have the camera positioned:

This took some trial and error, and the BerryCam software referred to above helped with positioning a lot.

I finally secured the camera to the deck with cable ties:

Hope this makes sense!  It was pretty easy to do, thanks to the blog posts I link to above.  I have a wifi adapter in the RaspberryPi – this might help you get that set up properly.  Also, when the camera is taking a picture, it lights up an LED on the camera board.  I thought this might cast a color on low light frames, so I disabled the LED using these instructions.

Have fun making one, and let me know if I can make this post more clear!

My mouth is on fire!!!  And I’m happy 😉

So this time I wanted to experiment a little more.  I got 4 tri tips and marinaded 2 of them in red wine, pepper, salt, garlic, ancho, and a few more spices.  I’d had a few beers and wanted to get them in the fridge overnight, so I may have been a bit too generous with the spices 😉

I decided that I’d rub 2 of the tips, and leave the others plain.  I mixed up some pepper, salt, sugar (just 2 teaspoons), chili flakes, ancho, garlic, and onions and rubbed that on one plain and one marinaded tip.

Then into the smoker with all 4!

On our trip to Santa Maria, I’d picked up a couple boxes of red oak sticks, so I cut those down and used 3 chunks.

I could probably have just used one!  After 3 hours, while I’d had plenty of smoke, the wood looked only half burned.

I let the meat temp get over 135F this time, to firm the meat up a bit and to see what the flavor might be like if it was less rare.  When I checked, some of the pieces had even gotten up to 145F.

Out they come, and into the pan for 30 mins of foil covered resting.  Next came the slicing!  Here’s the plain:

It was a lot firmer and easier to cut thin than the rare tips I made last time.  The beef flavor really came through.  Next was the rubbed, non-marinaded one:

While it tasted great, I should have skipped any spice hotter than black pepper.  The heat just detracted from the beef flavor and the rub flavors were too complex for such a great piece of meat.  Next was the marinaded non-rubbed:

I’m trying not to cut my glove, and fingers, open 😉  The wine smell and flavor were very strong.  Quite salty too.  Last was the rubbed and marinaded and, again, there was too much going on in the flavors.  I’ll take it a LOT easier on the rubs next time.

Here’s the bunch all together:

I didn’t slice it all because I’m going to chill it down to see if I can slice it even thinner.

My wife mixed up a little Santa Maria salsa to add to the meat:

All in all, a pretty good Saturday!  😉

In researching tritip for my smoking experiment, I learned that it was “invented” in Santa Maria, CA, so I’m sitting in a hotel here now!  I live in San Diego, so the wife and I jumped in the car and drove 5 hrs north and started hunting for good tritip.

Our first stop was at the Rancho Nipomo, and it’s been the best one so far!  The tritip is sliced very thin, and made into a sandwich.

I was more interested in the meat than the bread, but then the owner, Richard, came over and said he forgot to tell us about the salsa that we HAD to put in the sandwich.  Wow!  It’s a pretty simple, fresh tasting salsa – made with canned tomatoes.  The combo was excellent.  He also had us try a hot salsa, made with Manzano peppers.  I think I’m still sweating!

You can tell he loves what he does.  He threw in a pulled pork sandwich

and kept bringing us over other stuff to try, like the amazing chili on some chips.  My wife had the pork with a red sauce and nopales.

It was great, with a good heat.

For Saturday lunch, we tried out Jocko’s in Nipomo, CA, but failed to read that the BBQ pit doesn’t open til 4, so I got a pretty good bbq sandwich.

Next, we headed up the coast, stopping for a bit to see some Butterflies:

And llamas:

But the pony ride was a lie!

Very disappointing 😉

We headed back to Arroyo  Grande, CA to the Oak Pit BBQ.  I couldn’t decide what to get, so I got the sampler, which at $15 isn’t too bad!

Pork rib, beef rib, tritip, pulled pork, and sides.  Oh, and corn muffin.  mmm! Like Rancho Nipomo above, their tritip was not cooked rare.  It was good, but not as good as Rancho.  Or mine 😉

Elaine was missing vegetables, so she got a salad.  A tritip salad!  😉

The cook was VERY nice and told us that they smoked on red oak, just like I’d learned from my research.  I asked where I could get some and he pointed across the street to a market.

So now I have a trunk full of red oak pieces that are too big to fit into my smoker.  Elaine thinks my solution will be to cut it down, but it occurs to me that maybe the REAL solution is a bigger smoker!  😉

On Sunday morning we got up and headed back to Rancho Nipomo for more BBQ!  Here’s a tri tip sandwich with the proper salsa:

Also tried his ribs, which were very good!  Not as smokey as I like, but still great!

And here’s a picture of that super hot sauce I mentioned above:

On Sunday June 23rd, my daughter and I were due to fly home from Montreal, through Chicago, to San Diego.  Our flight was UA3466 at 6:31p from Montreal, and UA1061 at 8:45p from Chicago.