Photos

A small selection of flowers wild and cultivated

13 Jul 2026

Truly Portable Birdnet-Pi

Feeling very pleased with myself after a major accomplishment, even though all it really proves is that I can follow instructions.

The problem, as I have noted before, is that my little Birdnet-Pi needs to connect to the internet to update its clock so that it offers the correct time of day for each bird it detects. But if I don't have the WiFi details of wherever we end up in advance, there's no way to edit the Pi's configuration. Even a virtual connection requires it to already be online.

I did try setting the Pi up to log on to my phone as a hotspot, but that didn't work and because it didn't work I had no way to try and debug.

Anyway, two things changed all that. First, I discovered USB gadget mode. That would allow me to get into the Pi using a USB-C cable. There was one gotcha that wasn't well explained in the instructions, but would have been obvious to anyone who knew what they were doing.

You're told to run a Python program, but of course it doesn't work if you have not already downloaded the program. Duh. Of course, if you have downloaded the whole package then that little thing would have come with it, but because I already had the Raspberry Pi Imager app, I had not downloaded the package. Once I had, it all worked perfectly and produced a manifest file that added the option to enable USB gadget mode in the Imager.

I wrote a new image onto the PI's SD card, plugged it in, and blow me if it didn't work just fine. I couldn't access hostname.local that way, but the fallback IP method worked perfectly.

With that, I again stepped through the instructions to Set up BirdNET-Pi on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W¹, but this time I took the extra steps of enabling Tailscale.

With all that done, I had a truly portable Birdnet-Pi. I can access it from any of my Tailscale devices, which is great because I can check on it from my phone and use that to shut it down if needs be. I can plug it into my laptop with a USB cable and edit the WiFi configuration directly. And I can identify birds on the go.

Following instructions is my only real super-power.