THE BIRDBOX!

Fion needed birdsong for her piece ‘The Dreams of City Dwellers’. I dug into my drawers of electronics and found an old Raspberry Pi micro-processor, a very small amplifier, batteries, a speaker cone, jack plug, and a toggle switch. All I needed then was a box to put them in. A neighbour had given me crystallised ginger boxes to burn, but they were far too good to burn so had sat on the kitchen table since Christmas.

After juggling around I made them fit.

Then a quick bit of soldering to connect the components followed by quite a few hours of programming to make it work by only flicking on the toggle switch.
As always, the programming should have taken half an hour but actually took a few days of fiddling, a lot of googling and then Yay! It works. To operate just switch the toggle switch on and after 1 minute 17 seconds you hear beautiful bird song.

Drilling the holes through the box to mount the toggle switch and amplifier took far longer than it should, but in the end the result was quite neat.

Alan Hudson July 2023