Why Featherframe

TODO: Wells — the origin story, in a sentence or three: when you set up BirdNET, and the moment you wanted it on the wall.

A station hears more than you do

A BirdNET station in the backyard hears dozens of species a day, most of which you'd never notice. But all of it lives in a dashboard on a phone or a laptop, and you have to go and look.

I wanted it on the wall instead: something you pass in the hall and glance at, the way you'd glance out the window.

Why Audubon

John James Audubon painted 435 plates of North American birds for The Birds of America, printed between 1827 and 1838. They're some of the most beautiful natural history ever printed, and they're in the public domain.

They were engraved, which is why they look so good on e-paper. An engraving is lines and dots of ink on paper. So is an e-paper screen. On a 16-gray screen, a plate looks like the print it came from.

Featherframe also has John Gould's The Birds of Europe, The Birds of Australia and The Birds of Asia, drawn and lithographed in the same era. In Settings, Region picks which book comes first.

Why e-paper

• It looks like paper. No glow, no backlight. It reads as a print, not a screen.
• It's calm. The picture changes only when a new species shows up. Most of the day, nothing moves.
• It uses no power to show a picture. The picture stays on the screen with the power off.

What I care about

• Never a wrong bird. If Featherframe isn't sure which illustration matches, it shows the species' name instead of a guess.
• Few changes. A frame that flickers every minute is a screen. One that changes only when there's something new is a picture.
• It's yours. It runs on your own BirdNET device if you want it to. Your detector's data is only read, never changed.
• Open source. The server and the firmware are on GitHub, under the Apache 2.0 license.

Why AI, at all

Some species you'll hear aren't in any of the books. For those, Featherframe shows a name card, or, if you turn it on, an illustration generated in his style. It's optional, it's your key, and I've tried hard to make it worthy of the plates around it. See AI illustrations.

Support it

Featherframe is free. If you like it, buy me a coffee, or buy a ready-made frame from Wells Workshop.