What started as a way to know when the little flock of Superb Fairywrens1 would visit the garden, soon turned into something to know what birds are visiting. I could not spend all my time looking out the window waiting for the little fluff balls to chirp and hop about.
I had a thought that there had to be a way to use a microphone to detect the chirps of the Fairywrens, and then notify me so I could grab my camera. After some web searching, I came across a project that used machine learning to identify birds based on their sounds. BirdNET2 looked to be a perfect weekend project to put together.
The even better part of looking through the BirdNET repo, was that there was already a project that called BirdNET-Pi3 runs on a Raspberry Pi, effectively I just needed to plug in a microphone, clone the repo, and configure.