flathead

I have come up with a new way to win at chess: I have connected up a Raspberry Pi Zero in my pocket to some buttons and vibration motors in my shoes, so that I can surreptitiously communicate with a chess engine running on the Pi. The project is called "Sockfish" because it's a way to operate Stockfish with your socks.

Merlin is a free bird identification tool that uses both computer vision and computer audio to identify birds, with models that have been trained by bird watchers and ornithologists all over the world. It's a powerful tool for seeing what might be around when all you can hear is a song somewhere in the trees.

The audio model that Merlin uses is its own, using a neural net to identify birds from their sounds, analyzing the spectrogram of their calls. It's a standalone model and can be used even when your phone is offline, although that does limit what it can identify to about 700 mainly North American species. If you want to identify more and in more of the world, then you need to take a look at another Cornell project, BirdNET, from its K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics.

If you want to build a BirdNET system on a Raspberry Pi, there's an easy enough way to get started, with the BirdNET-Pi project. All you need is a recent Raspberry Pi running a 64-bit version of the Bullseye release of Raspberry Pi OS. I set up my system with the latest Raspberry Pi OS Lite release, which is designed for headless systems and removes the UI components.

Once my system was set up, I used the instructions on the BirdNET-Pi GitHub to download and run the installer. It's a simple script that loads the required packages and configures a Python environment for the BirdNET Lite machine-learning models. The system is designed to take a 15-second sound sample every minute or so, analysing it for bird sounds. The only additional hardware needed is a USB sound card and a microphone, as the Pi's audio port doesn't support a microphone.

Fully compatible with all Raspberry Pi versions including the high-power Raspberry Pi 4.
The LiFePO4wered/Pi+™ is a high-performance battery power system for the Raspberry Pi. It can power a Raspberry Pi for up to nine hours from its battery (depending on installed battery size, Raspberry Pi model, attached peripherals, and system load) and can be left plugged in continuously.

The Raspberry Pi and LiFePO4wered/Pi+™ communicate with each other over the I2C bus. A command line tool, shared library and language bingings for Python and Node.js are available to allow users to easily access the data inside the LiFePO4wered/Pi+™.

Using these tools, the user can access system parameters and configure features such as the wake-up timer, auto-shutdown timer and auto-boot settings. Some of the parameters can be written to flash to make changes permanent even if the battery is removed.

This looks great.