BirdNET Pi on 3B+

[dawt86]

Hi all,

Recently installed BirdNET Pi on my Raspberry Pi 3B+ and it's running quite well actually. In the discussion points here I read that I need to activate zram through the birdnet-pi-config menu to make it run better. Unfortunately I cannot seem to access this options menu at all. Running sudo raspi-config in an SSH session gets me into that menu no problems. What am I doing wrong?

Thanks

[ehpersonal38]

Hi,

The config menu you're referring to was removed quite a while ago, so to enable zram you have two options:

1) Follow an online guide for installing zram on Raspberry Pi

https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-zram/

2) Tread into dangerous waters and install the bootleg birdnet-pi-config

The birdnet-pi-config code is still available in the GitHub archives. So, if you want, you can access the script by copy and pasting the contents in the following link into a script called birdnet_pi_config.sh, and then running it as sudo. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mcguirepr89/BirdNET-Pi/0e6d5da6a89a2ed8952520bf5e64d4804a2acee9/scripts/birdnet-pi-config

One-liner command to do all that:

cd ~/BirdNET-Pi/scripts && [ ! -f "birdnet-pi-config.sh" ] && sudo wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mcguirepr89/BirdNET-Pi/0e6d5da6a89a2ed8952520bf5e64d4804a2acee9/scripts/birdnet-pi-config -O birdnet-pi-config.sh && sudo chmod +x birdnet-pi-config.sh && sudo bash ./birdnet-pi-config.sh

A note of caution, that script is really old and running most of the BirdNET-Pi related commands (change audio device, change password, install birdnet, etc) should be avoided otherwise they may catastrophically break your installation.

Hopefully that goes well for you! Best of luck.

[dawt86]

Thank you for the response, I enabled zram as per the first link and now we are running much more smoothly! Also increased recording length to 30s following some other feedback on here. System is super stable now and quite snappy despite what is probably less-than-optimal WiFi signal (I actually have a chance to put an ethernet cable out to the installation location so will be doing that – either for an AP or for the pi itself – in the very near future).

I am absolutely fascinated by this and it has increased my knowledge of local birdlife immeasurably. Family are all in on it now, too, so as soon as I can source more boards I'll be making some more and spreading the joy :)