Questions

Plug it in. The frame wakes up and puts a card on the screen with three steps and a QR code.

1. Scan the code with your phone, or join AVFrame from your Wi-Fi settings.
2. Tap the sign in to network notice when it appears. If it doesn't appear, open 10.44.1.1 in any browser.
3. Pick your home network, type the password, and wait for the check.

The frame then shows a five digit code. Go to avianvisitors.com/register, enter it, and tell it where to get your birds.

First birds land within a few minutes. After that the frame checks for new ones on its own.

This is the simplest one, and it needs nothing but the frame. Pick Birds near a ZIP code when you register and type your ZIP.

Your frame draws whatever birds people have been hearing near you over the last day, using BirdWeather's public data. No microphone, nothing to run at home.

If you have a PUC, your frame can draw the birds it hears rather than the neighbourhood average.

Pick A BirdWeather station when you register and enter your station ID. You'll find it in the address of your station's page on app.birdweather.com, the number at the end.

That's the whole setup. The frame reads your station directly, so the birds on the wall are the ones your own PUC picked up.

Pick My own bird mic when you register and give it the address of your instance.

One catch worth knowing before you start: the frame reads your mic from the internet, not from inside your house. An address like birdnet.local or 192.168.1.50 works on your own network but is invisible from anywhere else, so the frame can't reach it. You'll want your instance reachable at a real address, for example through a Cloudflare tunnel.

If you'd rather not expose it, the ZIP option needs nothing from you and you can switch to it at any time.

Go to avianvisitors.com/manage. If you registered on this browser you're already in. Otherwise put in the email you registered with and we'll send you a code.

From there you can change where your birds come from, rename the line printed above Heard Today, and turn the handwritten bird names on the collage on or off.

Changes reach the frame at its next check in. Plugged into a computer that's about a minute, on a charger a few minutes, and on battery it can be up to a couple of hours. Plug it in if you want it to hurry.

Open manage, expand Advanced, and press Change Wi-Fi network.

At its next check in the frame puts the setup card back on the screen and raises its own AVFrame network, exactly like the first time. Join it and hand over the new details.

Nothing is lost if you change your mind. The frame keeps the network it already has until a new one actually works, so you can walk away mid-setup and it carries on as before.

Plug it in.

Your old network is gone, so the manage page can't reach the frame to tell it anything. It works this out for itself: once it's plugged in and has failed to find the network it knows, it puts the setup card back on the screen and raises AVFrame again. Join it and enter your new details.

Give it a few minutes after plugging in. It waits to be sure the network is really gone rather than reacting to a router that's just rebooting.

It only does this while plugged in. On battery it keeps quietly retrying instead, because holding a network open is the one thing that would flatten a charge meant to last months.

Open 10.44.1.1 in any browser while you're joined to AVFrame. That's the same page.

Phones decide on their own whether to pop that notice, and they get it wrong fairly often, particularly on a network they've joined before. The address is printed on the frame for exactly this reason.

Over a year between charges in normal use.* The frame sleeps between checks and only spends real power when the birds change and it redraws.

Charge it with any USB-C cable. There's no power switch and nothing to press: leave it plugged in if you like, it's happy either way.

* Measured on the shipping hardware and updated here with the real figure.

Frames are sold at theodore.net/store, along with the mic kit if you would rather build the open source version yourself.

Yes. Open manage, expand Advanced, and press Release this frame.

It forgets your Wi-Fi, your email and your settings, and goes back to the setup card so the next person can register it as their own.