Exclusive · From our garden desk
A feeder that listens to the birds, weighs them on the perch and takes a photo when one lands. Every morning a receipt printer in the kitchen prints a garden newspaper about yesterday. The jokes are made up. The birds, times and grams are real.
Send visitors to the perch and watch how the feeder decides who they are. Then print tomorrow's paper. The paper is written from the notebook on the left and nothing else, and a fact check reads it before the printer does.
Tap a visitor. The feeder weighs it, records a few seconds of sound and takes one photo. Code decides what goes in the notebook. The model only gets to describe what the bird is doing.
| Time | Logged as | Scale | How we know |
|---|
No paper yet. Send a few birds, then press the big red button.
In this demo, templates stand in for Claude Sonnet. The rule is the same as in the real toy: every name, time and gram on the paper must appear in the facts file, or the sentence doesn't print.
Here is how I picture the first morning. Our 6-year-old daughter pulls a strip of paper out of the newsstand and reads that sparrows took the feeder at 6:12. Under the headline is a grainy photo from our own feeder, taken yesterday, of a sparrow sitting in the seed tray, where sparrows are not supposed to sit. She goes to the window to check. The sparrow is in the tray again.
Our 9-year-old son goes straight to "Who gained weight" and wants to know if 1.1 grams is a lot for a great tit. It's about 6% of a great tit, which he will find outrageous.
Every number on the paper is true. The jokes are the only part the model made up.
The kids give nicknames by voice, through the kitchen's Home Assistant assistant. The feeder can't tell one great tit from another, so a nickname belongs to the whole species. The Gazette is honest about that.
Bohouš is an old-fashioned Czech nickname, roughly "Bob". It sounds like a grumpy uncle, which suits a great tit.
Photo of the day: house sparrow, 6:12, sitting in the seed tray itself, which is against the rules.
Nine landings before 6:40, all between 27 and 33 g. Nobody else got a turn until the sparrows left.
Bohouš (great tit) visited 7 times. The feeder can't tell great tits apart, so every one of them is Bohouš.
At 14:02 an 18-gram bird sat on the perch and said nothing. Our lens says it has an orange front. Without a song, the editor won't name it. Readers may guess.
Under 1 g is a rumor. The scale is good to about a gram.
−3 °C and frost. Suet recommended for birds, gloves for readers.
I weigh less than two one-euro coins. Blue cap, yellow front, and I eat upside down. Who am I?
Answer: blue tit
Feeders with cameras already exist. You get a video stream nobody watches, or an app with a list of species. Before language models, turning sensor logs into something a kid reads over cereal took a human editor every single morning, and nobody volunteers for that job.
07:31 perch 18 g
birdnet great tit 0.91
vision "hangs upside down"
07:37 perch 11 g
birdnet blue tit 0.88Three kinds of AI, each doing one job. BirdNET is a small model that runs offline on the Mac and turns chirps into European species. Claude vision looks at up to 20 photos a day and describes behavior in plain words, which no sensor can do. Claude Sonnet writes the tabloid from a JSON file of facts, and its prompt forbids inventing observations.
The facts stay boring on purpose. Species comes from sound plus weight, checked by code. The vision model is never asked who the bird is. That leaves the model free to be as silly as it likes about things that really happened, and the kids end up doing family citizen science without anyone calling it that.
Printed on real paper. Printing AI output isn't new (Poetry Camera prints a poem about every photo). Here the paper carries yesterday's garden to the breakfast table, and nobody has to unlock a phone to read it.
Because the paper on day ten is about day nine, and day nine happened.
| Part | Job | Shop | CZK |
|---|---|---|---|
| In the garden: the feeder | |||
| Seeed XIAO ESP32S3 Sense | Camera, microphone and microSD slot. The feeder's brain. | estimate, Czech price not verified | ~500 |
| Load cell 1 kg | The scale under the perch | GME | 95 |
| HX711 module | Reads the load cell (24-bit ADC), good to about 1 g | GME | 35 |
| PIR HC-SR501 | Wakes the feeder when something moves | GME | 55 |
| 18650 cell + small solar panel | Power for the winter (or run a cable instead) | estimate | ~200 |
| In the kitchen: the newsstand | |||
| ESP32 board (e.g. XIAO ESP32S3) | Takes the finished paper from the Mac and feeds the printer | rpishop.cz | 269 |
| CSN-A2 58 mm thermal printer | Prints the paper, dithered photo included (UART, 5–9 V / 2 A) | LaskaKit, restock about Oct 23 | 928 |
| Total (two rows are estimates) | ~2,082 CZK (about €85) | ||
Prices checked on Sep 24, 2026. Not in the total: PETG filament, a microSD card, BPA-free thermal paper rolls, a power supply for the printer and the bird seed. The Mac that runs BirdNET and the Gateway (the home server that holds the API keys) is already on the desk. Vision and writing cost roughly 1–3 CZK a day (estimate).
Swipe sideways to see the whole diagram →
The camera sits inside a hooded tube that only lets it see the perch and the edge of the tray. It physically can't see the neighbors, the street or anybody's windows. After the first print, hold a phone where the neighbors' window is and check that it never shows up in a frame.
Photos go to the Mac. At most 20 a day go on to Claude vision for a one-line description, and then they are deleted. Only the photo of the day survives until it's printed.
A microphone in the garden can pick up voices, so sound never leaves the house. BirdNET runs on the Mac, keeps the species label and drops the clip.
BPA-free thermal paper only, since kids handle these strips every morning. The 18650 cell needs a protection circuit and a closed compartment. API keys live on the Mac, never on the ESP32 out in the garden.
BirdNET works offline. The feeder keeps everything on its microSD card, so a dead router loses nothing. When the network comes back, the Gateway catches up and prints a special edition. You can try this in the demo: switch off the feeder's Wi-Fi, send a few birds, print, then switch it back on.
One of sixteen finalist toy ideas in the Toy Workshop, generated by AI agents, picked by a dad.
Made by Ondra Malacka with Claude agents · malacka.cz