iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Oh, absolutely! A photo doesn't really lie, so as long as there are enough pixels to make out the likely numbers and letters, it is useful. Often what we get is a partial code off the photo, but it is often enough to narrow it down to a single bird, especially if there is also a "year" color code.

More likely to be photographed, the birds that survive into maturity are long-lived, the rings are rather visible. And of course as ornithologists, we would be looking out for these rings on our own anyways. So if we are checking out a territory and notice a ring, we will try to specifically read it

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And with eagles, we use "color rings", which are much easier read from photographs - those, once in a dozen will be recorded sometime, somewhere, sometimes many many years after the ringing.

Depends on the species, really. The passerines, 1 in a few hundred, but I am usually only made aware of the more "interesting" recaptures. But birds of prey like buzzards are much more common... Unfortunately with buzzards, they are usually found dead by the side of the road or under a electric pole

Well, I can tell you that on my e-bike trips (oops spoilers XD) I have not seen the ESC's temperature go above like 28C (That'd be after like a kilometer long full throttle uphill section). I run the Flipsky at 40V and 20A max phase current, 50A absolute maximum current iirc.

Hopefully I will be able to answer them all!

Not a problem! I am always up for sharing my bird knowledge <3 Y'know, like the birdbrain I am, hah!

This was at Kabli bird station. It is a scientific bird station directed towards the monitoring, data collection and study of migratory passerines foremost.

It is in-fact the 75100! Thanks for recommending it <3 It works extremely well! But I do recommend upgrading the firmware on it (make sure to disable phase filters immediately after doing so and never turn them on, otherwise you'll brick the flipsky :x), it was a further maybe 5% efficiency gain.

I Built an E-bike Motor From Scratch

The, perhaps, long-awaited e-bike motor video is *finally* here! This is the first part in a series of two videos. In this first one, I go over the design- and build process of this from-scratch DIY 500W+ electric motor befit an e-bike. www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pnC...

youtube.com

YouTube video by Birdbrain

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Birdbrain @birdbrain.engineer · 14/04/2026

The ones I am intimately familiar with are some of the Lenia type CA-s like Flow- and Particle Lenia. I'm sure there are others though, especially ones that are not quite as compute-hungry haha.

Birdbrain @birdbrain.engineer · 18/10/2025

As always, the bird center was a lot of fun(but also a lot of work)! Been back home a few days now and I am slowly back working on the latest video. We had about 4000 birds throughout the time I was there. Pretty good! Here, have a long-tailed tit, the most common bird we caught during that time.

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Birdbrain @birdbrain.engineer · 09/10/2025

Mostly been long tailed tits and goldcrests this time around. But I have had a day on a previous year where I ringed some 600+ blue tits and back then there was certainly just a little bit of blood drawn by the end of the day.

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Birdbrain @birdbrain.engineer · 09/10/2025

Sometimes the bird center visitors ask which bird is the hardest to deal with... Of the common species, eurasian blue tits Cyanistes caeruleus) are certainly one of the fiercest. Their pecks and bites hurt quite a bit and after ringing hundreds of them in a single day, one's fingers will be hurting!

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Birdbrain @birdbrain.engineer · 05/10/2025

Something I have not talked about in my videos, but could perhaps be quite obvious from my "name" and avatar is that I quite like birds! In-fact, I somewhat regularly still work with birds to this day. And so, I once again find myself volunteering at Kabli bird center! Here, have a tawny owl <3

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Birdbrain @birdbrain.engineer · 25/09/2025

Ah, this motor is not going to be paired with anything fancy most likely. I already have a cheap chinese e-bike/e-scooter ESC that I will be trying to set it up with.

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Birdbrain @birdbrain.engineer · 25/09/2025

My DIY e-bike motor finally spins up for the first time! <3 Granted, it's not using the proper speed controller yet (which in turn is *totally* not controlled improperly through an Arduino... oops), which means it is running undervolted and in a much narrower speed range than it should.

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Birdbrain @birdbrain.engineer · 24/09/2025

While I wait for the epoxy of my new diy motor stator to dry, I spent some time making a kind of art piece to put up on the wall at home. It's around 1:100 scale 3d printed "replica" of the Intel 4004 chip silicon die... the world's first commercially available CPU.

3D-printed large scale replica of the Intel 4004 chip showing the metallization and polysilicon traces as well as the diffusion wells. Banana for scale.

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Birdbrain @birdbrain.engineer · 19/09/2025

Unfortunately, what I was afraid would happen, did happen. 1cm thick 100% infill petg is just not rigid enough to fight against the >100kg of attractive force between the magnets on the rotor and the electrical steel in the stator. Redesign incoming, but means the video will be delayed further.

3D printed motor chassis bulging out of shape by about a millimeter.

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Birdbrain @birdbrain.engineer · 18/09/2025

And yes, those hall effect sensors are exactly as jank as they look! <3

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Birdbrain @birdbrain.engineer · 18/09/2025

Today is the day. A project I have been working on on- and off for the past 2 years by now, is finally (hopefully) getting completed today. Hopefully it works as intended and I can get the video about it out in the not too far future!

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Birdbrain @birdbrain.engineer · 15/09/2025

Nah, just a cheap chinese e-bike ESC. At least, that's currently the plan.

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Birdbrain @birdbrain.engineer · 14/09/2025

It's finally happening! Epoxy cast for the diy e-bike motor stator was successful... First assembly and tests in the next few days!

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Birdbrain @birdbrain.engineer · 16/08/2025

Cheap pressure cooker + old membrane vacuum pump + random leftover tubing and parts = vacuum chamber for epoxy degassing!

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Birdbrain @birdbrain.engineer · 02/02/2025

Goldcrests, the smallest birds in Europe, regularly fly insane distances compared to their body size during migration. Ie. last fall a goldcrest we ringed at Kabli, Estonia, was caught 5 days later in Denmark, 850km away! Interpolated to human size, that'd be like traversing about 16000km in 5 days!