Power managment/Recharging System and Communication System

Om Prakash Yadav

@prks345

Completed BE Electronics and communication from Purbanchal University, Working for Biomedical Fild for service support and regularly working and assisting on Reserch and Development of wild life. last not least wild lover.

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As we know Power managment/Recharging System and Communication System are chalanges for forest, so any one please suggest the Device and Power source to monitor sound in forest for Animal and People and Best Transmissin medium for monitor...... ?

Alice Michel

@aljmichel | she/her

PhD student at UC Davis studying gorilla communication & movement

2 January 2024 7:39pm

I've had success re-charging up lithium batteries for acoustic monitors in a tropical forest using a simple setup of a couple 50W solar panels (lightweight, flexible type) + portable power station + battery chargers. Data transmission was done by walking to the monitors to collect the SD cards, though, since networking them was not an option for me - not sure if that'll work for your application :)

Bill Gray

@coopdis | He/Him

Technologist, Environmentalist, Gardener, NatGeo Explorer

24 January 2024 5:32pm

Hi Om,

This is a difficult problem, and one that I am actively working on currently. It is a particularly difficult problem in a densely forested environment.

The approach that Alice describes is often referred to as "Sneakernet", which is short for put on your sneakers and run around to all of the units swapping out memory storage and batteries.

In a lot of environments, sneakernet is actually the best-in-class state-of-the-art solution. I am working to change this.

That said, depending on your specific environment and project dynamics, there may be less laborious solutions.

Could you share more details about your project? For example, what is the size of the area you plan to monitor? How many sensors (audio recorders) do you want to deploy per hector? Do you have access to the canopy? How much sun do you expect to get? What are the seasonal high/low temps? What kind of audio do you want to record? What fidelity? 24/7/365 or just specific periods? How close is your project area to infrastructure?

Kim Hendrikse

@kimhendrikse

I'm a software developer. I have open source projects in practical object detection and alerting that is well suited for poacher detection and a Raspberry Pi based sound localizing ARU project

24 January 2024 7:44pm

Great conversation. Please solve this, it will be helpful for my audio project.

So… if you have enough power, then my sound localization audio recorder might be what you need. Connect this up to a 5G modem and add a wireguard VPN and you can record audio with an accurate clock and pull the files back remotely. Microsecond clock accuracy with supporting sound localization software

Note, I will be trying this soon myself. I have the 5G modem. Now just the time.

Bill Gray

24 January 2024 7:44pm

Sounds great! How much power == enough?

Kim Hendrikse

24 January 2024 7:44pm

Yeah, I really need to measure it. But not from an adapter, rather from a battery. But I'd need to make an intercept.

On a 15000 mha battery and a raspberry pi zero it can run for 24 hours recording continuously.

To add remote access via a 5G hat would clearly add a lot more usage, likely the recommended approach would be to power off this system completely and power up by timer at specific times. In addition, the 5G hats or 4G hats come from sixfab.com in any case with Pi 4's or Pi 5s. But I suspect that there's nothing in principle to stop it from running with a zero because I think that it's primarily using a USB port to talk to the modem, however it comes in hat form so I'm not sure. I bet the hat could work on a zero as well.

Having said that, having a transmitter so close to the pi that is recording audio would induce audio noise into the recordings, but not during the times that it was powered down.

If you needed clean audio recordings for 24 hours continuously, then maybe you could join a pi that is running the LTE model connect to a pi that is recording via an ether cable. More power again but pretty certain to work as a configuration.

So yeah, lots and lots of things can become possible in wildlife preservation efforts or we can make strides in power providing solutions.

The other week I read that the Chinese had made a nuclear battery that could last 50 years. However, I was disappointed to learn that it could only provide 50 micro watts of power :-( Sigh...

Power can solve so many things. This setup uses a lot of power. However, the platform maintains microsecond system clock timing accuracy all the time. The time corrections are micro corrections happening all of the time. The recording software uses a real time network audio framework at the backend, which means that while you are making the recordings to the audio and tracking file, you can have addition have other streams also consuming the audio. which means that you could in principle implement a real time sound localization system for whatever you can hear on 3 or more microphones (Preferably 4x). And such a system could also in principle work together with a PTZ camera to turn the camera to where the species is located at that time, so much becomes possible.

Brett Muir

24 January 2024 7:44pm

Was also a question that I had. Detailed power requirements information/documentation would be super helpful for deploying such systems. It's ok if it's on the higher end if the capabilities it adds are valuable to the customer. From a sales perspective though knowing the power usage up front allows for providing potential clients a quote for a complete system with properly sized solar panels/batteries. Makes it much easier to propose as a solution to people.

Kim Hendrikse

24 January 2024 7:44pm

Being lazy, and involving chatgpt, assuming say not 24 hours but 20 hours, it calculates the current usage at 555 mA. So 2.8W.

Likely it won't actually be that high but the battery will not be able to supply what it says it can. None the less, high enough.

I have to make a cable with a break in it to measure the actual current usage. I'll put it onto the backlog. But it's low prio, because it principle others can do this as well if they wished. And I have a cost freeze on it right now. I spent around 1500 euros I think to develop this audio recorder project :)

One day I'll get around to it. The power usage is essentially the power usage of a Raspberry Pi zero plus around 25ma current usage for a GPS and maybe 5-10ma for a USB sound card I'm guessing. Way more than a microcontroller, but very readily available, cheap, repurposable and in principle a platform that could in theory support real time localization. These are the factors to weigh up in choosing it for a usage case. For a recorder attached to a house on the edge of a jungle, it's an easy choice :)

Checking other people's work about measuring power, I think the 0.55W is likely a pretty good valuation of the Raspberry Pi zero plus gps plus mic audio recorder.

See here:

Bench marks power consumption - Raspberry Pi's

Brett Smith

@diyaquanauts | he / him

Digital nomad, software developer, running mechatronic engineering firm in Seychelles to assist ocean conservation groups.

25 January 2024 6:15am

This is actually a super big problem.

Its wierd how there are not more off-the-shelf solutions for this - I guess the field is just too niche.

If you're system is using a raspberry pi I did find one pretty solid off the shelf option for power scheduling:

I have also put a lot of effort in designing our own power managing device - but it is not yet ready for the big time, we're hoping to get it field tested this year...

I would certainly value your input! For our immediate use case we basically just need an ultra low power way to turn a 5v switching regulator on and off - however I am trying to design for wider use cases! If you could layout some of your system requirements here that would actually be a big help:

What are your current systems?
What are those systems power requirements (required voltages, required amperage, etc)
What does your solar setup look like?
What are your connectivity requirements?
What are your form factor requirements?

Here's is the current repo for our design:

And if you really want to get into the nitty gritty, I put together a video explaining the design work so far: