Hannah Robertson's Birduino plays bird vocalizations on demand: tap an NFC-stickered playing card to an RC522 RFID reader, and an Arduino Nano drives an MP3 module to play the matching call. The sound library is the Cornell Guide to Bird Sounds of the United States and Canada, a $20 compilation covering 908 North American species. The deck caps practical use at 54 cards, 52 birds plus two Jokers.
The hardware stack is deliberately unoriginal. An Arduino Nano, an RC522 breakout, and an off-the-shelf MP3 player module keep wiring simple and let existing libraries do the heavy lifting. The NFC cards are commercial bird-themed playing cards with adhesive NFC stickers applied to the back. The RC522 does not fully implement NFC, but reads the sticker UIDs reliably enough to map each card to its audio manifest. That mapping was manual work, and the original writeup details how Robertson structured it.
The laser-cut clear acrylic enclosure comes with a specific, tested tip: use Clear Gorilla Glue Gel, the squeeze-tube variant, to bond acrylic without frosting or clouding. Robertson flags that Gorilla Glue's product line uses nearly identical names for chemically different products, so verify before buying. The full build log at hannahilea.com covers wiring, library choices, manifest structure, and construction in enough detail to replicate or adapt the design.
[READ ORIGINAL →]