Installation

Installing BirdNET-Pi Enhanced on a Raspberry Pi

A complete install takes about 30–45 minutes, most of which is unattended. You need three things: a Raspberry Pi, a microSD card with 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS, and a USB microphone.

What you need

Raspberry Pi

A Raspberry Pi 5, 4B, or 400 is strongly recommended. The Enhanced Version's analytics and insights pages do real computation across your entire detection history, and on older boards those pages get slow once you have months of data.

A Raspberry Pi 3B+ or Zero 2 W will run the detection engine, but both must use RaspiOS-ARM64-Lite, and you should expect the heavier reporting pages to lag.

SD card and operating system

Use the 64-bit version of Raspberry Pi OS — please use Trixie. The Lite image is recommended because you don't need a desktop, but the full image works too. Both are available directly inside the Raspberry Pi Imager.

32-bit will not work. This is the single most common installation failure. In Raspberry Pi Imager, expand "Raspberry Pi OS (other)" and pick an entry that explicitly says 64-bit.

Microphone

Any USB microphone or USB sound card will work. Microphone quality affects detection quality more than almost anything else, so an inexpensive dedicated USB mic will noticeably outperform a webcam's built-in microphone. Position it outdoors, sheltered from direct wind and rain.

Step 1 — Image the SD card

In Raspberry Pi Imager, choose your Pi model, select a 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS image, and select your microSD card. Before writing, open the settings (the gear icon) and:

Set a hostname — birdnetpi is a good choice.
Enable SSH and set a username and password.
Enter your Wi-Fi network name and password, unless you're using Ethernet.
Set your locale and timezone. Get the timezone right — every "today", hourly chart, and dawn-chorus calculation depends on it.

Write the image, then put the card in the Pi.

Step 2 — Connect the microphone and boot

Plug the USB microphone in before powering on, so it's present when the system first enumerates audio devices. Power up the Pi and give it a couple of minutes to complete its first boot.

Step 3 — Run the installer

Connect over SSH from another computer, substituting the username you chose:

ssh yourusername@birdnetpi.local

Then run the installer. This is the entire installation:

curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zach7036/BirdNET-Pi-Enhanced-Version/main/newinstaller.sh | bash

You can run this as the very first command on a fresh system — the installer takes care of any and all necessary updates itself. It writes a log to $HOME/installation-$(date "+%F").txt, which is the first thing to check if anything goes wrong.

Expect this to take a while and to look idle at points. Compiling and installing dependencies on a Raspberry Pi is slow. Leave it alone until it returns.

Installing alongside other servers is not supported. BirdNET-Pi expects to own the web server configuration on the machine. If you need to coexist with an existing web stack, open a discussion first.

Step 4 — Open the web interface

From any browser on the same network:

http://birdnetpi.local — or your Pi's IP address if that name doesn't resolve
Default username: birdnet
The password is empty by default

Step 5 — Finish setup

The dashboard shows a setup checklist until the essentials are done. Two of them genuinely matter:

Finding your way around Settings. Settings in the sidebar opens a hub page of tools — Station Doctor, System Controls, Services, and so on. The first button on it, also called Settings, is where the station's own options live. That's why the paths below read Settings → Settings; the checklist on the dashboard links straight there if you'd rather skip the hop.

Set your latitude and longitude under Settings → Settings → Location & Weather. Without coordinates, species range filtering can't work and you'll get identifications for birds that don't occur near you. Weather data also depends on this.
Set an admin password under Settings → Settings → Advanced Settings. Until you do, anyone on your network can change your station's configuration.

Then wait. Most stations get their first detection within minutes, and the analytics and insights pages become genuinely interesting after a week or two of data.

Keeping it updated

Update from the web interface under Settings → System Controls → Update. New releases are published on the GitHub releases page.

Uninstalling

This removes the software and the BirdNET-Pi directory, deleting all of your audio and database files in the process. Back up first if you care about your data.

/usr/local/bin/uninstall.sh && cd ~ && rm -drf BirdNET-Pi

What you can do with it Troubleshooting Coming from another fork?