Using RasPi and Qwen 2.5 VL to find out when birds visit my balcony

Name: Using RasPi and Qwen 2.5 VL to find out when birds visit my balcony
Availability: InStock
Author: akshay326

by akshay326·Apr 4, 2026·4 points·0 comments

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AI Analysis

●●SolidCozyNiche Gem

93 lines of Python found birds peak at 3 PM, not dawn like everyone expects.

Strengths

•Retry logic with exponential backoff handles Pi Zero's flaky WiFi without crashing
•Qwen 2.5 VL at $0.37 for 1,500 images is genuinely cost-effective vision AI
•Interactive dashboard loads real captured frames live from Supabase storage

Weaknesses

•Personal experiment with no reusable tool or library to extract
•OpenRouter API dependency means it's not truly offline or self-contained

Post Description

I had one question: when do birds show up at my bird feeder?

Setup: Raspberry Pi Zero 2W + USB webcam + Supabase (free tier) + 93 lines of Python that captures a 1280x720 frame every 60 seconds with retry logic for the Pi's flaky WiFi.

Analysis: Ran 1,500 images through Qwen 2.5 VL 7B via OpenRouter API. 996 tokens per image. Total cost: $0.37.

Results:

- 433 birds detected across 3 days (23.7% of frames) - Peak hour: 3 PM (86 birds), not dawn like I expected - Afternoon (12-5 PM) accounts for 70% of all activity - Day 3 had 6x more birds than Day 1 — Bird NPS of 100, they told the flock - Biggest frame: 5 sparrows simultaneously - Species mix: house sparrows, house finches, pigeons, one possible hawk

Hardware BOM: $80.23. Running for a year would cost ~$27 in API.

Page has the interactive dashboard, real captured images, and links to the code.