When we moved into Pi Towers 5.0 (I think we’re up to number five?), the finance team got seated next to some excellent massive trees. They wanted to add something to attract wildlife to their office window, and decided a bird feeder was the way to go. However, being two floors up meant they needed a little help getting it high enough in the tree for them to see it from the window next to their desks.

3D printed solution

Enter our Maker in Residence Toby, who is by this point so adept at catering to the incredibly niche needs of our engineers that a helpful design came to mind seconds after Monica in the finance team asked for help. The little metal loop designed to hang the bird feeder by hand wasn’t big enough to fit over the larger branches higher up the tree, nor for the makeshift telescopic hook the finance team had made to enable them to reach those branches.

Toby took to Fusion 360 to design a larger and more rigid hook, which he then 3D printed. He printed the hook in two halves so that he could sandwich the original metal loop on the bird feeder between them and glue it in. He taped another plastic hook elegantly to the end of a telescopic pole, and that is what allows the team to get the bird feeder out of the tree, refill it, and put it back up there.

Future upgrades

The Finance team don’t often get to play with hardware or software, but they’d like to experiment with adding a Raspberry Pi Camera to the setup. The idea is to position it at the window inside the office and connect it to a Raspberry Pi running bird detection software. The camera would then take a snap of any creature the software deemed birdy enough, and the team could come in after evenings and weekends at home to catch up on the ornithological goings-on at the office.

I suggested they might want to look into joining the global BirdNET-Pi community once this upgrade is complete. BirdNET-Pi is a real-time acoustic bird classification system designed for Raspberry Pi. It uses a USB sound card to pick up bird sounds, and classifies them locally using a pre-trained machine learning model. If I am successful in persuading them to do this, then all of you would be able to click around the map to see and hear what type of wildlife we have in the trees at Pi Towers. We can all birdwatch together. Yay.

Let me know in the comments if you’ve made something for your desk or office to make your day a little brighter. I’m currently trying to keep a donated chilli plant alive on my desk, and it sits comfortably on a crocheted leaf-shaped coaster made for me by another colleague. I have nice work friends.