Hi everyone! @Hubertszcz has a biodiversity monitoring project in Panama, and we have been working on quick and dirty, ultra low cost high quality insect monitoring. We built a model last year that we tested out and has been getting decent data from! I'm crossposting from the GOSH forums where we are also developing and discussing it. There's more example images there!

Mothbox v2 - Design and Thoughts?

Hi folks! a project @Hubertszcz and i started up last year got some more funding thanks to the experiment.com thing. We got about 4-5K we are putting towards designing a new version of the device What is it? an automated device that lights up a sheet and documents the insects that visit it. We originally made it for reforestation groups that will use it to monitor changes in biodiversity (this is what @Hubertszcz is up to). This is how scientists usually use this technique for studying...

GOSH Community Forum

We got a tiny bit of funding for a couple weeks of design work and are gonna make a new version, and i'm checkin with you all to see if there's any extra things i should consider in the next design!

Here’s some design targets for it:

• be weatherproof and self-contained and functioning while left outside in the rainforest for a month at a time
• automatically turn itself on for 4 random nights during that month
• get high quality images of the insect visitors (for instance moths that are only 5mm long) that can be processed later
• be reliably usable by non-experts
• cost less than $400 in parts
• the attractive/ photographable area should be at least the size of an A4 piece of paper (210x297mm)
• adaptable to use different types of lights (We have a weatherproofed USB attachment)
• Be carry-able by foot by a person to deploy deep into the field. Ideally a person could carry 2-3 of these at a time.
• Be robust to survive travel into difficult places to reach

our current version has been built and tested over the past couple months.

I was just about to do some testing with exactly these cameras, and @tom_august and @albags saved me the trouble with the testing they did in their very similar project

Testing Raspberry Pi cameras: Results | WILDLABS

So, we (mainly @albags ) have done some tests to compare the camera we currently use in the AMI-trap with the range of cameras that are available for the Pi. I said in a thread somewhere that I would share our results, I can't find that thread, so here are the results.First, the cameras we tested were:And the Hawkeye could not run at the full potential of 64MP because the Raspberry Pi we were using was not powerful enough, so it is at 32MP in the below.Here is the standard image that we took with each of the camera, though in the results I'm just going to show you a small part of each image so you can really get an idea of the variation in quality. The board had a 'test card' print out on it with a few moth wings attached for good measure.In the comparison you can see that all the Pi cameras are better than the webcam and are also much smaller and cheaper. There is not a big difference between the two mid-range cameras but the hawkeye is better quality, even running at half the resolution it can do. The Hawkeye is picking up individual scales on the butterfly's wing. That might be overkill for many applications, and generates bit image files, but if you need that kind of resolution its pretty good!

wildlabsnet

I was thinking about possibly testing out the 5MP arducam SPI cameras i could control with a microcontroller for ULTRA low energy use, but i think that that would be too low resolution for our purposes. It looks like the 16mp RPI cam would be fine, but i think we will stay with the hawkeye now that we got it working and getting better images. 

One of our main concerns right now is POWER. the whole thing can run on our battery for a night or two right now, but we want LONGER and i think we can get there with possibly better power management. @tom_august what system do you use to cycle your pi into lower power modes.

Let me know any other thoughts on our design!

these are some example cropped images