The Hutton's Shearwater Charitable Trust
Hi,
Has anyone any experience of using the ESP32 chip's built in capacitive sensing to detect the presence of birds.
I have borrowing birds that I can use PIT tag to tell me which bird, but need to detect direction of movement, and also the possibility of the presence of an untagged bird.
Any ideas if it is worth taking the time to see if it works?
I've never played with that chipset family, but it seems promising. I like the fact that it comes with both bluetooth and wifi built in. I need to use rs232 cables to communicate with the current family of PIT readers I am using, and I need to update them to wifi to allow me to be immediately notified if birds of interest show up (I live within 10 minutes of the colony, and we deployed geolocators on last year's chicks, and really want to get as many as possible back, sometimes they only visit their home colony once before being attracted to some other area by a mate).
7 February 2019 2:40pm
Hi Ted,
I don't have experience with that chip either but this sounds like an interesting idea. But zooming out a bit, may I ask what PIT reader are you using?
Thanks,
-harold
8 February 2019 5:07am
Hi Ted,
This is all very interesting. The solution you describe seems eminently doable and in fact quite cheap. So doable and cheap that it may behoove one to also ask what the higher level vision is, in order to further constrain the solution.
For instance is there a wider need for this kind of monitoring (e.g. other birds or animals, other localities); or perhaps a need to generate greater outreach or involve new volunteers.
Thanks,
-harold
Harold Tay