Rotundest Robin: Building a Smart Bird Feeder That Weighs Songbirds (emf2026)

How do you answer a question like "Is the particularly round Robin that visits my bird feeder huge or just fluffy?". This talk documents my attempt to answer this question by building a smart bird feeder that tracks the weight of visiting birds, which in combination with a custom computer vision model and a night vision web cam, helped me build a data set of all the visitors to my bird feeder. Come along for Python, micro electronics with the Raspberry Pi, machine learning, and a slow pigeon inspired descent into madness. And of course the answer to the ultimate question, how heavy is this robin? Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ about this event: https://www.emfcamp.org/schedule/2026/147-rotundest-robin