🦉 Start Here

[scottchronicity]

Hey there! Welcome to Orpheus!

In case you're here for slides of the presentation at Merge 2026, you may find them here.

Orpheus is an edge AI wildlife station I've been building in the Michigan woods. It runs on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX with four cameras and four research-grade microphones. Everything runs locally. No cloud dependency.

The "Observe" stack is running. Audio capture, BirdNET species identification, crow vocalization analysis, event correlation. The "Act" stack has audio playback working but not the intelligence on top of it yet. There are more holonic layers to build between the raw sensors and a proper agentic loop before that makes sense. I'm building this thing to grow and last, so I'm taking the time to make sure the foundation is solid.

If you want to poke around:

🖥️ Run it yourself

You don't need a Jetson. Follow the macOS Quick Start. Clone it, run make dev-stack, play some bird sounds near your laptop mic. You should see detections in the dashboard within 30 seconds.

🗺️ See what's planned

Browse the GitHub Issues. There are 9 Epics covering everything from the cognitive holarchy to surviving Michigan winters in a plywood box. Filter by good first issue if you want something scoped and approachable.

🧭 Understand the philosophy

Read the Open Source Roadmap. Tenet 1: First, Do No Harm. Tenet 6: Humans Are Just Another Species.

🔧 Contribute

Fork it, break it, build something cool. Full contribution guidelines are in CONTRIBUTING.md. This is a passion project and I have a demanding day job, so I might be slow on reviews. But I love seeing what people come up with. If you propose a PR, just make sure it's tested, linted, and validated against the Mac or Jetson golden paths so we can keep the repo clean.

If you have questions or ideas, start a new Discussion thread so each topic gets its own space.

— Scott (@scottchronicity)