Bird Buddy July Update
over 4 years ago – Thu, Aug 05, 2021 at 05:24:11 AM

Hi everyone,

Thanks for all the great comments we received from you following our last update; we really enjoyed reading them all. We have another juicy update for you with the latest on our hardware progress, developments in our app, an announcement of a new team member plus an updated breakdown of the manufacturing and shipping schedule.

Tooling

It’s been a very busy month working on the over 30 tools that make up Bird Buddy and its accessories. The images below show our progress at various stages. We will have the tooling complete and we will be producing parts by the end of this month 😀.

Alpha and Beta Builds

As part of the design and production validation process, we will be building batches of units called the “Alpha” and “Beta” builds. The Alpha units will comprise of all final components and preliminary tooled plastics allowing us to send units for laboratory testing and certification as early as possible. The Beta units will enable us to work out any kinks in the production line and to validate the fixturing and test equipment. These units will be fully functioning Bird Buddies!

Lab Testing and Certifications

In order to ensure that our products meet the health, safety, and environmental protection standards of Europe, US and other countries around the world, we will be pursuing lab certification testing. This process can typically take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months, so we have been diligently working through development and sourcing to help ensure this process is efficient. For example, the latest decision we made was to invest in a “UL pre-certified” battery. To explain, UL certification is a process where the electronics, including the battery pack, are tested to ensure that they will pass all safety and reliability tests. Without this strenuous testing, there is a greater risk of batteries having issues (remember when the Samsung phones were catching on fire?). However, this testing can take some time and if you fail the test, it can take weeks and sometimes months to address the issues and retest. To reduce the risk to the schedule and the test, we are opting to build the first 50,000 units using a “pre-certified battery” which means it has already been tested and passed these tests. This is a really costly decision as the battery is almost twice the price, but we believe it is worth the investment to ensure safety and try to keep on schedule. 

Schedule

Despite our best efforts, there is now clearly going to be a delay in shipping of up to two months depending on your region and time of backing. There were some circumstances we couldn't work around without sacrificing quality for time and that was just not an option. We're very proud that we were and are mostly able to navigate the craziness of 2021 and that we're still on track to ship all units by the end of the year, but we are also aware the delay will cause some disappointment and for that we are sorry. We are doing our best.

That said, here is the current schedule. As mentioned above, we will have fully functional Beta units completed by the end of September and intend to ship about 50 units out to some of the very first backers at that point. At the same time, all of the components for mass production will be arriving through the month of September in preparation for the commencement of mass production on October 11, immediately following the Golden Week holiday (this is the annual week where factories traditionally close to give their employees a break and a chance to visit family). Here is how the production ramp up and schedule looks right now: 

•  Sept 30: 50 Beta units
•  Oct 15: 1,500 pre-certified units
•  Oct 22: 3,000 pre-certified units
•  Oct 29: 5,000 pre-certified units
•  Nov 5: 7,500 certified units
•  Nov 12: 7,500 certified units
•  Nov 19: 7,500 certified units
•  Nov 26: 7,500 certified units
•  Dec 03: 7,500 certified units
•  Dec 10: 3,000 certified units

You may be wondering what “pre-certified units” are. This simply means that the lab testing has not yet been completed so these units will not have the final markings on the product. We will be building pre-certified inventory and intend to ship as many of these units as possible through the month of October, however, please note that in some countries and regions, including the EU, we can not legally ship product until it has a CE marking on it. This means that backers in these locations will receive shipments as early as possible once we attain our lab certifications which should happen by October 28th. By the end of October we should be at full production capacity with all lab testing complete! 

Pairing

This is where our hardware and software efforts come together. Remember, you’ll only be interacting with your feeder through the app, but for this to work, you’ll first need to pair the devices.

We decided to place all instructions in the app rather than in print as this allows us to localize them and only show you the version in your language. What’s more, we have the ability to animate! If animation is used correctly, it makes everything so much easier to understand. This is an example of the step where we ask you to go outside and walk around with the feeder to test the strength of the wifi connection.

Activity feed

We envisioned a section in the app where everything you need to know comes together. It currently goes under the working name “Activity feed” but it will be much more than a log of your activities.

First and foremost, this is a place where we’ll be reminding you to keep your feeder filled, charged and cleaned at all times (you’re probably aware that inadequately cleaned feeders can increase the risk of disease transmission in the birds we love, and we’re taking this very seriously).

This is also the section of the app where you’ll be notified if a friend grants you access to their feeder (or if they accept the invitation to access yours).

To sum up and not bore you with too many details: anything that ever happens, and we counted 30 possible different events, will always be logged here. 

The most exciting app event is obviously the one: when you miss the arrival notification and still get a postcard from that rare bird. In this scenario, we’ll just show you a mailbox and ask you to open it to build some suspense 🙃.

First test selfies

Species recognition is a critical element of Bird Buddy and it is no surprise that the AI performance is an important part of our testing regime. To do this in advance of our full scale manufacturing and production, we developed a handful of prototype cameras (which are very municipal and functional looking - nothing like our end product!). In fact, these are off the shelf commercial cameras that we have adapted to simulate the point of view of Bird Buddy for the test deployment only) that are located around the world with our volunteer testers. We’ve just started to receive the first images back and really didn’t want to hold onto them. Here is a small selection of our favorites so far 😍.

Missing any bird species?

In the previous update we showed you, among other things, an example of a single species profile in the app. You’ve probably noticed that they look nothing like encyclopedia pages. That’s because our editorial team is working hard to bring you fun and visual, yet informative presentations of each species.

We’ve sold Bird Buddies pretty much across the globe, and we want to make sure you all get an amazing experience. To achieve that, we want the very first version of the app to already include a vast majority of featherly visitors to your backyard.

Since coming up with playful copywriting and humorous visuals for each species, while not sacrificing scientific accuracy, coupled with localizing to numerous languages, is a major undertaking, it's important for us to understand the structure of your expected visitors in advance as well as possible.

We’d really appreciate your help here. Please click on the button below and let us know if you’re missing any birds that often visit your feeders.

While you can expect us to keep updating the database forever (as soon as our AI will spot a member of new species in the network, our editorial team will start working on the presentation of that species), we’re aware one never gets a second chance to make a first impression, so it would mean the world to us if you can help us identify any missing species in advance.

Welcome to Dan

We wanted you to be the first to know about our new VP of Logistics and Supply Chain, Dan Christian! Dan (favorite bird: Red Tail Hawk) has a truly top notch track record having left his position as Director of US Logistics for the consumer gadget giant, Dyson, to work with us.

Dan has spent his entire career in the logistics and supply chain industry, starting out straight from college working in a warehouse which fuelled his fascination in the sector. Over the past 25 years, Dan has worked with a number of startups as well as established firms including Lunatik, US Robotics, Logitech and 3Com. He has also witnessed the seismic shift that the movement of goods around the world has seen, with technology at the heart of both Point of Sale fulfilment and internet purchase - track - return cycle moving away from lengthy manual processes that took significant time to complete and log.

In choosing his next career move, Dan was inspired by our vision and positive impact (as well as our seriously good tech):

“The Bird Buddy product is fabulous and the team is passionate about what they do every day. That really inspires and excites me about being part of it. There is so much potential after such a great start. We are very aware how we need to match that success with our delivery and fulfilment process, which we are working hard on.” 

As you know, in the past couple of updates, we have been talking about the current-day issues affecting the shipping and logistics world due to the pandemic, material and freight capacity shortages, and as our expert on this matter, we thought it best for Dan to speak to you directly:  

“I have done this for a long time and currently, this is probably the worst I’ve ever seen it from the standpoint of the ability to move goods from place to place. Honestly, I don’t see it getting better until mid or late 2022 as it will take that long to build up the infrastructure and add the capacity that is needed. Basically, transit times have easily doubled.”

“For us, here at Bird Buddy, this means we are being creative in our approach to logistics and fulfilment, looking to work with the larger transportation companies as they create more capacity but also with a raft of new startups who are shaking up the sector with regional and localized delivery services. We want to use the best tracking and communications technology for all our backers and customers to be able to see shipping progress on a real-time basis. It’s a critical aspect of our fulfilment process and one that we are excited about - in a responsible way!”

Thank you for your continued support and belief in our project 💚 

The Bird Buddy team

P.S. How do you like our new loading animations?

Bird Buddy June update
almost 5 years ago – Fri, Jul 02, 2021 at 02:47:02 AM

Hello everyone!

Here in the Northern Hemisphere, we are really enjoying the start of summer. The dawn chorus is a spectacular sensory experience, the joy of birdsong uplifts the start to any day, and we hope you are experiencing this too! 

It’s no surprise we continue to be very busy here in getting our Bird Buddy product ready for fulfilment with plenty of progress on development of both the software and hardware apsects.

Hardware progress

Mechanical & Tooling

Since the last update, DFM (Design for Manufacturing & Tooling Design) was finalized, prototype and validation models created, and we kicked off tooling on all 20+ parts and accessories. At this point, we anticipate the first article inspection to be completed for most parts around the end of July. We will share images of the molds and first parts with you as soon as we can!

Electrical

This was and is an extremely challenging process which has required a ton of coordination among our engineering and sourcing team and all of the different component suppliers. For example, on an early revision of the design we had specified and tested a specific component on a Thursday that had hundreds of thousands of units available, and by Monday there was zero quantity available. This scenario (and more like it) are the reason we had to build in redundancies and adjust to a very dynamic development and testing program. All of that said, we have now built and assembled the first round of PCBAs and have completed much of the firmware programming needed to begin validation testing.  

Component Sourcing

We are very proud to say that we have now secured almost all of the main components (including chips!) required to be able to deliver all pre-sales to date. In the current climate, this truly feels like a herculean undertaking and major accomplishment as a startup when even large corporations are struggling to procure chips and other components. We aren’t completely out of the woods yet, but in general this is now a lower-risk category for us delivering products to you, our backers. 

Logistics

Over the past couple of months we have been interviewing a wide variety of regional and international 3PL (Third-Party-Logistics) partners and have now narrowed the list down to four top candidates. In the meantime, we have developed a comprehensive SOW (Statement-Of-Work) and RFP (Request-For-Proposal) that we will be sending out this week to start the process of making a final decision and moving forward in preparation of fulfillment.

OOBE (Out Of Box Experience)

We are now well into the design of the OOBE and are connecting with packaging suppliers to engage on structural packaging and materials for quotes. Aligning the physical and digital aspects of the OOBE is very important as there is back and forth happening with the product and app during setup and installation of Bird Buddy. Our current intention is to provide much of the instruction and guidance in the app and we intend to make it a very interactive, helpful, and beautiful experience. 

Schedule

We know many of you are holding your breath on this and as we promised we will be fully transparent about it. As mentioned before, we have lost some time in development and testing and we continue to work around the global chip production and logistics problems (which are in constant flux it seems) but we have also identified opportunities to accelerate in the later stages. 

The success of our kickstarter campaign and the huge popularity of our Bird Buddy product not only blew us away but also presented us with a different challenge of scale and mass order fulfilment. This sheer volume means that we will need to stagger fulfilment which, in turn, means, as previously mentioned, that it is spread out during the Fall. In terms of when you will get your Bird Buddy, to the best of our ability, we will be fulfilling units in the order in which they were placed during the campaign.  This will happen in batches and we are aiming for the first shipments to start in late September. 

We will, of course, keep you updated with news on this as and when we have strong certainty on dates. We are extremely appreciative of all of your support, patience, and encouragement throughout the process and will continue to do everything we can to deliver as soon as possible!
 

Software update 

It’s really an amazing feeling when you start seeing an app come to life and gain functionalities you’ve spent so much time discussing, planning and designing. This is the stage we’re currently at with software development. Bird Buddy is slowly but surely coming to life!!!

In software development, our work is mostly split into three larger areas. Backend and server infrastructure, mobile app development and AI. Each has their own set of parameters for success and areas of focus. While the backend must be fast and scalable, the mobile app must be delightful, snappy and stable, and finally, the AI must be predictable and accurate as much as we can train it to be. We’re making good progress in all three fields and have engaged seasoned consultants on any critical point to review our work and decisions in an attempt to minimize any surprises down the road. 

We’ve talked about the app for quite some time now, and the time has come to start revealing how it actually looks.

Control your session

So, what actually happens when you respond to a Bird Buddy notification about a new bird visitor? You open the livestream from your backyard, and quickly snap the first photo. Maybe the bird just moved a bit, maybe you want to snap a photo from a slightly different angle, or maybe you’re just like our product manager’s mum, who likes to take 3 identical photos every single time, just to be sure one of them is perfect :)

Whichever it is after the photo has been taken, we do not wish to interrupt your further photo-taking so, we’ve developed a user interface that can take the photo and collect the identification at the same time.

As you take photos, they are getting stacked above your camera button. Your session can go on for as long as you want, and once you’re ready to move on, you enter the collecting flow, by clicking Collect. Only then the photos are actually added to your collection (but worry not - if you walk out in the middle of the session, or your phone dies while you’re taking photos, we’ll save you a draft). 

Disclaimer: In this demo the video resets after every photo which is not how this will behave in the final version. The video will stream continuously as you take photos.

What about the videos?

As promised, this will of course also be supported. You’ll be recording videos from the very same interface. To record a video, just click the photo button and hold it. It works a lot like camera buttons in TikTok, Instagram or Snapchat.
 

Multiple feeders

Those among you who own multiple feeders will be delighted to see just how easy it is to switch between them.

Animations

You’ve probably noticed the little blue guy jumping the skipping rope/swimming in the pool in the video above. They’ll be keeping you company all the time, so we really hope you’ll get along well :). Here’s three of the “loading” animations, just so you get to feel their vibe.

Adding photos and videos to your collection
    So, you’ve clicked that green “Collect” button, and you’re now ready to add the freshly generated media to your collection. As we do not want to keep you waiting, we’ll first tell you the name of the species you just collected. The first time a member of a certain species visits you, you unlock it, and as they keep visiting, we keep a count of how many times they visited.

But what if you miss that notification?
    Don’t worry - even if you’re sleeping, dining, driving or working, Bird Buddy will make sure that the bird leaves you a postcard.

Ok, now that you’ve got your photos ...
    As we don’t want your collection to become a dump for numerous almost identical photos, we’ve carefully designed a flow which allows you to easily curate and save just the best photos. We’ve added support for a swiping mechanic, popularized by the dating app Tinder. 

Every photo you’ve swiped right, has now been saved and added to your collection.  At this point, you’ll get the chance to select the hero shot, the photo from the session you liked best, maybe spice it up a bit in the image editor, and then share it on social media.
 

But what happens in case the AI doesn’t recognize the bird?
    Even though we are fairly confident that the vast majority of visitors to your feeders will be recognized most of the time, there’s just too many things that can happen for us to not be  prepared for the reality of some not being recognized the first time. Here's how we'll go about it. In case we aren’t completely sure about the species, we'll ask you to send the photo in review.  Once the photo is tagged by alternative methods on our end, we'll add it to your collection.

We’ve had quite some fun with the potential error states here, we don’t want to give away too much, but since many of you have been so vocal about squirrels stealing birds’ food, we went ahead and added a mugshot background to every photo of a squirrel. What do you think :)? 

Collection
    This is the place where all your images will live :). We decided to only show species you’ve already unlocked, because having you navigate among 1000+ species to find the one you’re looking for seemed unnecessary. You’ll be able to sort the beauties by date (the time of last visit) or by the number of visits.

Bird profiles
    While we want Bird Buddy to be educational, we also want it to be fun. We want everything we say about birds to be true, but we don’t want to sound like professors. We’re working hard to present to you every single species in a humorous, easily understandable and visualized way.
     Let’s take a look at the profile of the European Robin, for example. First of all, every single bird comes with it's very own icon. With different colour patterns and beaks, they somehow all still fit the B from our logotype, and we're really happy with how that turned out. Please check out some more bird icons below if you're interested how they turned out.

You’ll notice three tags under the name of the bird. These are fun (but true) traits of the species. You can click on each of them to understand why we labeled it this way. We believe this is an effective, yet very casual way to learn about birds.
 

    Unlocking a bird in the collection gives you access to photos of that species from all over the world. Through this feature, you’ll be able to observe this species in other Bird Buddies (if their owners decide to opt-in to such a feature). Don’t forget to go and upvote the ones you like best!

    The profile of each bird will also feature the icons of the species’ favourite food. It will allow you to listen to their calls, learn about their size through silly comparisons (banana for scale! :D) and help you understand their distribution and habitat, both through “theoretical range” and actual Bird Buddy sightings.

Help us assemble a bulletproof database!

We are happy to be able to say that we’ve finished assembling a very global and comprehensive database of included species. To make sure we’ve included all potential backyard visitors, we want to run it through some of our backers. If you’re worried your area isn’t covered, or you just often have some not so obvious feeder guests, please reach out to us at [email protected]. We’d love to ask you a few questions :)
 

In other news

We continue to come across scam websites and social media pages which we act on to remove and get taken down. If you do find any, please contact [email protected]  to alert us.

Another piece of news, this month we won the coveted ‘Slovenian Best Start-Up’ award! This success is down to our fantastic team but mostly down to you, our backers, for believing in us and our product - thank you!
 

With best wishes,

The Bird Buddy Team

Bird Buddy May update
almost 5 years ago – Wed, May 19, 2021 at 02:21:35 AM

Hello,

As promised, we are here with our monthly update to let you know what has been happening the past few weeks. Whilst there are not any big updates on any one aspect of our developments, we want to provide you with progress on three critical areas: hardware, logistics, and software.

Hardware

We continue to overcome challenges we are encountering that are typical during the development of a new-to-world product, as well as planning and managing against the ongoing supply chain and logistics crisis that nearly every company (large or small) is currently facing (more on that in a bit).

Since the accuracy and reliability of bird detection is key to our product, we have invested heavily in testing a wide range of potential technology and component solutions for accurately sensing birds of different sizes and colors in a variety of lighting conditions. This testing is critical to make sure that we have a solution that is extremely reliable, will not drain the battery or add additional parts that could create a point of failure, and importantly one that we can source components for in a reasonable time-frame. We have done a similar exercise for sensing seed levels, which is a bit trickier than originally anticipated, and are proud to have landed on solutions for both that accomplish all of the goals extremely well.

We have also been focused on engineering the main feeder in a way that is better optimized for high volume production. Originally the feeder housing was going to be multiple parts that would be assembled together with screws. In an effort to reduce assembly and make it more durable and easier to clean, we re-engineered the housing as one large main part. Similar optimizations have been happening across all of the parts of the system, including the solar roof and all of the mounting accessories.

In production planning, there are two potential bottlenecks that we are addressing. The first is the large plastic housing and the second is the speed of the test fixtures on the line to make sure every unit is working properly before it is boxed up. To mitigate the plastics bottleneck, we are opting to make several single-cavity tools that we can run in parallel. We considered a multi-cavity tool, but since there aren’t as many presses big enough for a tool of that size, making multiple smaller tools gives us more options and better machine availability for production bursts. We are also tripling the amount of test fixtures we originally planned on to keep up with the other rates on the production line.

Logistics

We would like to bring your attention to the unprecedented global manufacturing challenge - chip production and supply chain logistics. You may have seen in the news (Bloomberg, BBC News, CNBC, Freight Waves) a number of factors that are making for the perfect storm: the global demand for sand, a crucial component of the beautiful, multi-faceted, multi-use silicon chip, has soared; Taiwan has suffered its worst drought in many years affecting the supply of water to its semiconductor production factories; shipping is stretched to an all-time high with freight vessels and airplanes backed up; and, let’s not forget how COVID-19 has affected factory workers. Every business, both new and well-established, well known brands, in fact anyone needing a chip is affected. It is unlike anything the world has seen in the modern global age of manufacturing.

What does this mean for us? Well, we are busy developing Plan A, Plan B and Plan C in real-time, and we are working with an extremely professional and experienced manufacturing partner to navigate through this. We are currently investing a lot of time into developing redundant solutions and component sourcing strategies to mitigate this as much as we can.

In short, we are working around the clock to ensure first and foremost that we can deliver an extremely high quality product and experience with Bird Buddy, and also to maintain the schedule during these challenging times. This remains one of the biggest risks to delivering the product on time, so we promise to keep you informed!

Software

We have laid all the technical groundwork required for the Bird Buddy app and server infrastructure and are now deep in the implementation phase of individual features and interfaces. No big surprises yet but there’s still a lot of work ahead.

One interesting challenge was making sure that our architecture supports simultaneous streaming to multiple mobile devices, as many have asked about the ability to share their Bird Buddy experience with family members. To allow for that, we had to design the whole architecture around that principle. For you, it’ll be as simple as entering an email and pressing a button, but for us there’s a lot to consider in the app, on the server, as well as on the actual Bird Buddy device. This also highlights the amazing nature of crowdfunding where we’re able to get your input early in the development stage as these kinds of features would be much harder to implement after the fact.

Since many of you opted for more than one feeder, we’re also designing for the opposite scenario: one user - many feeders. Switching between streams will be a seamless experience similar to toggling between the main and selfie mode of your phone camera.

We also have our final design scope and are full steam into the very detailed development roadmap, which will keep us very busy over the summer months. As this is a critical part of Bird Buddy, we’ll be adding two more expert team members to help us with the app development: Mojca and Niko will join us at the beginning of June.

Since our last update, we’ve given a lot of attention to designing and polishing the photo-taking flow. What started as an interface looking a bit like the cockpit of the space shuttle is now a substantially simplified view, which however remains just as powerful. Such clarity can only be achieved through numerous iterations in the design process. If we paraphrase Blaise Pascal who once said: “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter,” - we’re happy to be able to say we’ve had enough time to come up with a camera interface which only consists of three buttons :)

As number of you have expressed concerns that birds from your area might not be included, we’ll just leave you with reassurance that, while we’re continually working to make sure we don’t miss any rare feathery friends, we will always know if a photo of bird our AI can’t recognize was taken, and update the database after the sighting. We’ve gotta catch ‘em all :-).

To round off with a note about our test camera opportunities, thank you to those who have very willingly offered yourselves and your backyard as volunteers to be a tester. The form and other details about this will be included in one of our future updates - watch this space.

Thank you for reading our monthly update,

The Bird Buddy team

What makes Bird Buddy smart?
almost 5 years ago – Fri, Apr 09, 2021 at 02:31:04 AM

Hello,

As you know one of the core features of Bird Buddy is its smart use of artificial intelligence to let you know which birds are visiting your feeder or are singing on nearby tree branches. It’s an amazing tool that will make learning about your backyard friends much simpler and more accessible. The progress in machine learning in the past decade has made it possible for us to even consider this as a feature and, without that effort, we wouldn’t have been able to build it on our own. Nowadays, even your smartphones are capable of computation that results in the quick identification of a bird species based on an image or sound.

At Bird Buddy, we already have a working AI system for recognizing bird species based both on image and sound. It’s a combination of existing models published by research institutions, and extended by our own data and logic to further improve its performance and range of birds. Our system can identify, but you’ll be able to help too! 🤓

Have you ever solved a Google reCaptcha marking traffic lights or crosswalks on a grid of images? 

All you were doing is providing input for training an AI model! Similarly, while you’ll be using Bird Buddy, we’ll let you train the model by identifying species that the model won’t be able to match. As you can imagine, with the huge range of environmental conditions, our model might initially struggle at times, but with your contributions, we’ll be able to build the most complete model for detecting bird species that visit feeders. We’re considering various procedures and protocols on how to acquire and validate user input, as not all of you are experts in the field, able to tell apart the various kinds of subspecies, and mistakes are bound to happen. But we’re not the first to encounter this challenge and we’re leaning on experts to help us design a reliable system.

To test drive our systems and further improve the model before we launch, we’re now preparing to deploy a network of test cameras around the globe which will start aggregating as many bird photos as possible from the perspective of Bird Buddy and give us some much needed data. We’re very excited about this step, as this will provide important insights into the performance of our model and identify improvements. 

We’ll share our findings and the model we’re building with the community to be used for research purposes. We feel very fortunate to be able to build an amazing product that will help people engage with birds and at the same time contribute important information to the research community that is fighting to protect them.

Thank you for reading through our update and have a great rest of the week!

The Bird Buddy Team

P.S. We have realised that committing to a weekly backer update and then trying to find interesting content for each one is not how we want to do things. We’d rather avoid filling your inbox with junk amongst real progress. So, what we promise, is to provide you with a regular monthly update with supplementary ad hoc postings as and when we have other interesting developments to tell you about. To be reassured that we haven’t gone quiet or disappeared, you can always follow us on Facebook to see what else we are up to on a daily basis.

Premature optimization is the root of all evil
about 5 years ago – Fri, Mar 19, 2021 at 01:47:00 AM

Hello,

Anyone who has worked in software development will be familiar with the title as one of the core principles we try to work by when starting out a new project. The assumption being that we tend to over-optimize software for cases that we really have no reason to think will actually occur. Engineers being engineers, we love to think about bottlenecks and questions of scaling right out of the gate, when our time would likely be better spent just getting it done and in front of users and customers to see if our product will ever require the kind of scale we so want to optimize for.

While the above holds true for the vast majority of projects, Bird Buddy is one of those rare cases where the scale we’re building for is clearly too large to do so without a big investment into (not so) premature optimization.

We expect to have at least 50,000 Bird Buddies shipped by the end of the year streaming video, sound and photos to at least 50,000 mobile devices. With a few assumptions about average daily use, we can predict our daily bandwidth will quickly exceed 30TB or around 36 thousand hours (~4 years) of your favourite Netflix show each day. As Bird Buddy is powered by AI, we’ll also have to do inference (identification) on a slice of that data which represents another significant computing load. This will require serious infrastructure that serves a global audience, and while it might seem intimidating, we’re fortunate that we can build on the shoulders of giants and leverage global providers like Amazon Web Services. We can use their global network of servers and data centers to deploy Bird Buddy reliably across all regions.

We finally get to geek out and build for the kind of scale every developer dreams of, until they wake up in their own sweat in the middle of the night realising what’s at stake. But that’s a part of the job and it’s fine, it’s totally fine. Right!?

Joking aside, we are already setting up a stress testing framework that will allow us to simulate a chunk of that traffic on demand with the goal to uncover as many bottlenecks and issues before launch, and make sure the launch goes as smoothly as possible. We’re confident in our ability to build a reliable and amazing product and are tackling challenges with respect for their complexity.

As our work will in many ways depend on the previous contributions of open source communities, we would also like to express our gratitude to everyone contributing to essential projects that keep the web running and enable companies like Bird Buddy to focus on what matters most, building their product and serving their community. We’d also like to reiterate our commitment to contribute useful data and code back to the public. Data about birds can prove especially useful for research purposes, as every Bird Buddy can serve as a small monitoring station with extremely valuable data for conservation efforts.

We’ll now go back to responsibly geeking out and will update you on our progress as things start to gain shape in the following weeks and months.

Thank you for being an amazing community and reading through our weekly update!

Have fun and stay safe,

Franci and the Bird Buddy Team

P.S. Hot off the press: our legal team managed to shut down most of the websites that copied our content and were advertising a “Smart Bird Feeder” that is supposedly available to ship right away. To our knowledge, all reported sites are now down or have removed the ability to purchase, so if you come across anything fishy, please let us know! 🙏🏻