Over the holidays I was building a wooden birdhouse with a Unifi Protect camera and a small web interface that automatically identifies the birds and shows me a simple overview over which type of bird visited how many times.
Indeed, that was one of the posts I stumbled upon when I started building this. There's also another one which I found interesting (https://hawksley.org/2025/02/20/my-ubiquiti-unifi-protect-bi...) as it documented the way to mod a G5 camera to set the focal length as someone on Reddit also documented before.
I've thought about it and it would make the whole project even cooler with actual stats of "birdhouse regulars" not just in aggregated form but I don't know if it's possible and if bird faces have enough unique features to differentiate them?
Right now I only use it so that my thumbnails of pictures from the camera are centered on the head in the UI as I couldn't find a pre-existing model that does it for animals. I'm thinking that maybe having this data set of a few hundred bird faces will allow me to train a small one in the future to do it more automatically. If not...I at least learned something new about building models!
Thanks, it's named after a similar commercial project called Birdbuddy but I didn't want to pay for a subscription and potentially have some e-waste on my hands in a few years. I also wanted to have it integrated in my existing Unifi setup.
Ah yet another glorious yak shave... "Hacker refuses to pay for coercive subscription service which isn't even compatible with the home setup, and spends inordinate time and resources making the thing themselves.".
Birdhouse: https://img.notmyhostna.me/cRQ1gJfZCHjQKwFrgKQj
UI:
- https://img.notmyhostna.me/Hnw4qcvbg1ZQCrFxzGMn
- https://img.notmyhostna.me/62TFwSXSRRbCfxDz297h
- https://img.notmyhostna.me/40qhgHmSqQsrGr8BC7Db
- https://img.notmyhostna.me/9bgz4GYsjQH33n3MtWKp (Face labeling, so I can show thumbnails of the actual birds that visited and train a ML model on it in the future)