This DIY E Ink Display Brings Local Bird Sightings to Your Wall

Birdwatching involves a lot more than a pair of binoculars these days. Apps can identify birds by sight or sound, online databases track sightings from around the world, and AI can help classify species. But despite all of that technology, there is still something special about the traditional illustrated field guides used by generations of bird enthusiasts. A new open source project called Inky Bird Frame combines those old and new worlds by automatically displaying scientific-style bird illustrations based on species recently observed near your home.

The system presents polished field-journal plates on a 13.3-inch six-color e-paper display housed inside what looks like an ordinary picture frame. The display changes over time as new species are observed nearby, creating a constantly evolving collection of illustrated wildlife artwork.

The project is built around two separate components. A controller monitors observation sources such as iNaturalist, eBird, and BirdWeather using configurable distance and time windows. If an illustration for a detected species already exists in the local catalog, it is immediately reused. Otherwise, the controller begins a workflow that gathers licensed reference photographs, researches the species, generates a new field-journal plate, and independently reviews the finished illustration before it is approved for display. Once a plate passes review, it is permanently cached and is never regenerated.

A Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W mounted behind the frame downloads approved illustrations from the controller, verifies their integrity using checksums, and rotates them on a Pimoroni Inky Impression 13.3-inch color e-paper display with a resolution of 1600 × 1200 pixels. Rotation can be sequential, random, weighted, or use a shuffle-bag algorithm that ensures every approved bird is shown before repeating the cycle. While the creator's own frame reuses a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 and Waveshare carrier board that were already available, the Pi Zero 2 W is the recommended hardware for new builds.

The controller can run on a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5, an existing macOS or Linux computer, or inside a Docker container. Separating the controller from the display node allows the more demanding research and image-generation tasks to remain off the wall-mounted hardware while the display simply downloads and presents approved artwork over the local network.

The project documentation includes an installation guide and a detailed bill of materials, along with a growing catalog of location-neutral bird illustrations that can be shared between installations. For all the information you need to build your own Inky Bird Frame, check out the project’s GitHub repository.