hagerty/birdart

BirdArt is a Python project that turns real bird activity picked up by a BirdWeather listening station into artwork displayed on a Samsung Frame TV. Instead of showing a static photo, the TV displays generated art based on which birds have actually been detected nearby recently, refreshed on a schedule you choose. The workflow runs as a series of steps. First it pulls recent bird detection history from BirdWeather, covering both the last day and a longer ninety day window for context. Then it builds a text prompt describing the current mix of birds, giving more weight to species that show up less often, while being careful not to overclaim which birds are unusually rare if the underlying data was incomplete. That prompt, along with a couple of your own reference images for style, is sent to OpenAI's image generation API to create a new piece of artwork. The image is then resized to an exact 4K resolution for the Frame TV, uploaded to the television over the same network, and only after the upload is confirmed does the project record which birds were featured that time. All of the personal setup, such as your station ID, your TV's network details, and your reference photos, is kept in local configuration files that are excluded from version control, so this information never gets published if you share your own copy of the project with others. To run it, you need Python 3.11 or newer on macOS or Linux, an OpenAI API key for the image generation step which can incur charges, and a way to reach your Frame TV on the local network. The project includes a shell script meant to be scheduled with your operating system's task scheduler to run automatically a few times a day, along with separate scripts for previewing artwork or checking the TV's current status without changing anything. There is also documentation for running the whole process through Codex instead of doing each step by hand.