Birds often damage property and may pose a health hazard. They are often, rightly, protected and cannot be managed through barbaric means. They can however potentially be managed through their sensitivities and through encouraging their predators and competitors. rpi-unbird utilizes the portable nature of the Raspberry Pi, though any portable, linux device may be used, with an external speaker to play animal sounds which both discourage birds from congregating and encourage natural predators like hawks to patrol the area.
At it's most fundamental level an rpi-unbird device can be considered an electronic game call device/speaker combo. Hunting birds is illegal in many juristictions. Be sure you know the laws in your area.
Items Required:
RaspberryPi (or any portable/small Single Board Computer running Linux)
Portable plug-in speaker
Power Source (a battery bank or wall plugs)
Appropriate cords
Install and configure your OS (Rasbian). I strongly recommend setting your time and time zone correctly so the scripts will execute at the intended times.
Download either via git or wget and install (installing user MUST have sudo privelages):
wget https://github.com/sunshine-cid/rpi-unbird/raw/master/install.sh
bash install.sh
or
cd ./rpi-unbird
bash install.sh
Command line flags available:
-u username - set username to build setup under /home/username. Default is current user ($USER)
-s starttime - set time of day to begin playing sounds (24-hour format). Default is 9am (9)
-e endtime - set time of day to end playing sounds (24-hour format). Default is 5pm (17)
-b sambaenable - d to disable samba setup, e to enable samba setup. Default is enable (e)
-n installnumber - used for setting the installation number in hostname and hosts. Default is 1
How the schedule works:
Weekdays play all the sound packs. Weekends play only sounds beginning with a 'z_' prefix. You can use these guidelines to alter the behavior of what plays when. If you don't want to include any set of sounds in the install, download the files seperately by copying the download portion of the code, running it, and then delete the tar.gz file you do not want to include. Though I strongly recommend keeping the silence.tar.gz as continual squaking and screaming for 8 hours a day is unrealistic and pretty disturbing. The script is setup to not download if any of the default files exist. And also if you want to include additional sounds include a tar.gz file of the MP3's. MP3's which have a 'z_' prefix will be included in weekday AND weekend e"z_"listening scripts.
Thank you to https://chemicloud.com/kb/article/download-google-drive-files-using-wget/ for the detailed instructions regarding wget'ing files from Google Drive.
Thank you to https://raspberrywebserver.com/serveradmin/share-your-raspberry-pis-files-and-folders-across-a-network.html for their invaluable help configuring SAMBA.