Had a fantastic night at the Kinks “Sunny Afternoon” musical at Alexandra Palace theatre. The energy of the cast and quality of the music was superb, combined with my favourite venue in London. Highly recommended if you get the chance to come over to Ally Pally this week before they continue a tour around the UK. Otherwise this week have split my time between making bat / bird detectors, wrangling with Ultralytics installation on RPi Trixie with Mini Forge and two full on days of teaching plus our annual open evening.
Open evening at Bartlett.
Spent the start of the week finally getting to get hands on with the acoupi package (paper over here on BES Methods in Ecology and Evolution). This meant working with RPi5’s for the first time and setting up Conda Miniforge to get the right python environment. Once familiar with the acoupi package and reminding myself how to configure Audiomoths it was all really straight forward. Now have the batbox in the allotment updated from the 2017 version of the Intel Shazam for Bats Edison based device to one with a Pi.
Acoupi and Batdetect2 running on a RPi5 at the allotment.
Was surprised to start picking up readings at dusk in January. Some spectrograms below of the first few days.
Was also experimenting with cameras from streaming and object detection. More on this and pointers to the repo next week.
Also took the opportunity to update my existing Birdnet-pi installation since the original Patrick McGuire version is now no longer supported (used this fork by Nachtzuster - note: had some issues with missing labels on home page chart - had to update Matplotlib). Coincidentally this is also the Big Bird Watch weekend. Here is this years count for the day compared to last year and 2024:
2026
2025
2024
Looking at links.duncanwilson.com, these parts of the internet crossed my path this week: