I waited 2 years for this thing. And now getting it in the fall with the solar roof is a chore. Battery completely drains overnight somehow.
I have to log out of the app and back in to see postcards.
My cameras will say taking postcards but I never get any.
It identifies the wrong birds constantly even after I have seen many and categorized them.
Recategorizing is not simple.
Solar is only on one side of the roof, bad design idea.
I see birds on the feeder but never get a postcard about it.
Overall photo quality is good. I like what I get but I only get to have one camera out at a time since I’m always charging them. Daily.
I do not quite see why also I cannot use my apple password to login, since it boots me multiple times a day that would be great.
Would love to change my review after they get more updates out…… but if how long they took to develop and ship these is any indicator we will be waiting two years. Cannot believe what I paid and my ring camera I set up does better at this point.
Edit: postcards are finally coming through with the last camera update. The camera had to be reset and the app had to be redownloaded as it got stuck, which wasn’t great. App logs me out occasionally. Another issue is that an incorrect bird is sometimes used when identifying. For example, there was a choice between a house finch and pine siskin, but both example images were of the house finch. This will make it difficult for people to identify the birds if they don’t know them well. Looking forward to more improvements!
So far, AI is not great. Birds are not being detected nor are postcards showing up when birds are on the feeder because it does not seem fast enough at capturing images. The only times we’ve gotten postcards are for squirrels and it seems like it is because they are on the feeder longer. It’d be nice if postcards could be generated from live view. Hoping it will improve with future updates
I have had my Bird Buddy in action for about 10 days now, and it has identified 8 bird species so far. I just love the whole idea of this combination feeder/camera/identifier, and I am very happy they were able to complete the project even with all the problems that COVID caused during their production.
There are still some problems to be worked out, but I am confident they will get them fixed as time passes.
For example:
I have marauding blue jays who like to pose for the camera. I have saved 60 postcards thus far, and probably deleted almost that many. Still, every day, it asks me to ID blue jays in some very obvious pics.
I had to look up in my Sibley book the difference between a house finch and a purple finch. I didn’t realize until now, that all of the purple finches in the postcards I saved are actually House finches. Now if I want to change the IDs I have to go through each pic individually and say “wrong bird”. And then I don’t think I could delete the whole empty folder.
When it asks you to guess the species of the bird, it would be useful to magnify the photo. I don’t see where you can do that until you download it to a desktop computer. The postcards/pics are very high resolution when you do download them, but you can’t magnify them in the app.
There are other minor issues I think they could work on, but overall I am very happy.
1.) Loses credentials twice in the past 2 days. Have to sign back in. Would be nice if the iPhone version of the app could pull from Apple password store. (iPad version appears to be able to use the apple saved password when signing in). This might be related to the second item.
2.) I have to force-quit and re-launch the app to get an update on the status of my device. Perhaps it will automatically update over time (I can’t tell), but if so, there needs to be a visual indication on when to expect an update. Every morning I open the app and see the battery level from the previous evening.
3.) when re-classifying birds, I sometimes get errors when saving, after successfully renaming several other pictures. Probably an API limit being hit, but the app needs to handle that better.
The overall idea of the smart feeder is nice, but the implementation so far needs a lot of work. In the app, there’s too much cutesiness in the cartoons, animation, and the idea of “postcards”. OK for the first day, but after that you just want to turn that off and get down to simple pictures. There also needs to be a way to turn off further pictures of birds already seen too many times. I don’t want any more pictures of the many tufted titmice that visit my feeder every day. But the main issue is battery life. I have to bring it in to recharge every other day, despite having the solar roof (which seems to provide very little charge).
So fun to have the feeder up and get pics if our feathered friends. I do wish we had the ability to scroll through pictures, and we are having difficulty getting pictures of certain birds. I’ve seen cardinals and chickadees feeding, but no pics have come through so I guess they’re not sitting in the right spot. Battery life is poor , but future updates are supposed to address this AND it’s late October in Northern Michigan, so colder temps drain it faster.
Overall, though, it’s fun to get new postcards and see who stopped by. So far we’ve got our regulars; Blue Jays, purple finch, goldfinch and a tufted titmouse. No one has eaten the suet yet, so no woodpecker pictures. Hoping for more variety as we go along…
The app is not integrated well with IOS and does not allow for saving your password in keychain.
A lot of unnecessary cartoon like crap instead of direct information feed. Lose the postcard crap and cartoony graphics.
The photos collected are only available in this proprietary software, and are not available in your photo library. They therefore cannot be edited, exported or used in any other manner than to view within the application. HUGE DOWNCHECK! This alone drops the overall experience to one star.
They wasted significant money on the development of bird recognition, a capability which already exists in the scientific community with vast databases and is already available to birders (The Merlin app). Direct integration with Merlin and eBird and collaboration with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology would have been a vastly more desirable approach.
Not clear whether this happens in this application or the feeder itself, but there is extremely overly selective filtering of when a photo is taken. I can watch my feeder for 30 minutes and see 12 different species visit 40 or 50 times and get zero photos. Would much rather be offered many photos I could filter myself. In short, the combination of this app and the bird buddy is a toy, not truly useful equipment for the serious birder.
Huynh Family iTunes
saghilarious
Lester's Flat
jsbillings
Retired Linguist
DB- ET
Zeke_A
