We just got back from ICTC in Peru! It was an amazing conference put together by the team at Wildlabs that was really engaging despite being HUGE! Congrats ICTC team!
Manufacturing Update
Our 2025 Wildlabs Award was given to us with the goal of producing a "More Manufacturable Mothbox." We have ordered over 40 functional PCBs now, which makes me pretty happy to say that I think we have achieved the goal! With the push of a button at JLCPCB, i can a batch of 20 of these shipped to my house in Panama 2 weeks later for a total cost of about $38 per board. It's a great feeling, and opens up a lot more opportunities for us! For instance we are doing lots of workshops all over the world from now until august thanks to these advances!
Mothboxes in Barcelona!
I have 3 Mothboxes that I am doing a workshop with in Barcelona, Spain. I would be happy to give these to someone nearby who could use them for just the cost of the raw materials. let me know if that's you!
Get the Latest Firmware! (DIY+ Pro)
Between travel and talks and workshops, I’ve been whipping together improvements for the firmware!
Notably, we have so many mothboxes out, we are able to start hunting down weird rare race condition errors. For instance, tackling a problem that could arise if the script that tells the box to take a photo happens to finish up the same millisecond that a shutdown gets triggered, weirdness may happen! but hopefully no more!
Other improvements:
- Fixed date setting bug
- improved timezone setting
- more robust internal handling of system controls
- switched display fonts to Atkinson hyperlegible. The previous font scientifica was cleaner looking on a small display, but its stylization posed difficulty to folks at the workshop. This new font is supposed to be extra easy to read, so hopefully you like it!
Tutorial for flashing the firmware for your mothbox here.
Firmware updates on the horizon:
- Try to kill UI in non-debug mode (hoping it frees enough ram that we can use the pi5 2GB or 1gb with the arducam)
- Implement the physical schedule switches on mothbox pro
- create high power mode for devices not on batteries
- program schedules from QR code mode
The Github repo has been organized!
It used to be that going to:
https://github.com/Digital-Naturalism-Laboratories/Mothbox
was your one-stop shop for everything Mothbox related! As the project grew though, the github repo got a bit unwieldy. For instance, if you wanted to run a couple of the latest scripts, you might have to download the full 2+GB repository of documentation photos, 3d models, etc..
but no longer!
Now that same link above will lead you to a list of separate repos for specific things like
- hardware
- firmware
- post-processing
- visualization
- PCB development
Hardware Improvements
Running workshops is always great because we get to find new issues every time we can try to improve! For instance, some workshop folks were having difficulty getting the SD cards in and out of the pi. I made a new chassis design where i expanded the area, and now fingers fit well!
Mothbox Team at ICTC in Peru
Our workshop went wonderfully! With help from folks in other cool groups like Noe in france and the UK Centre for Hydrology and Ecology, we had folks build their own Mothbox Pro’s and deploy them the same day!
It was a huge success to get to go through the entire process, from building, to deploying, to processing, with a wonderful group of folks.
Everyone was really helpful and gave tons of great feedback! Also all of the PCBs we had assembled by JLC totally worked! So if you filled out our pre-order form, we will be contacting you shortly!
Plus 7 of these mothboxes went off to new homes in europe and south america!
I also got to give an invited talk at the closing plenary in front of everyone about the mothbox!
Thanks everyone who was able to join us!
Get help Troubleshooting by making a github issue!
It can get pretty difficult as a lone developer trying to provide tech support for folks all around the world! Help me help you by listing any mothbox questions or troubleshooting you are doing over on the Github Issues page!
Year of the Moth: Upcoming Timeline
Catch Andy if you can!
March 2-12: Barcelona
Doing some bubble and wildhacking workshops with design students there!
April 14-16: Ohio with Imageomics Mothbox Workshop
April 19-30: Seattle - Open Automation Workshop
We will be in the area helping run a little symposium on Open Source tools for Laboratory Automation. We will be in the Seattle area for a while after that until we go to Berlin!
May 23-24: Berlin - Open Hardware Summit -Mothbox workshop
We will be hosting a Mothbox making workshop, exhibiting Mothboxes, AND running a MOTHRAVE in the park!
If anyone knows someone who has a speaker and projector we can use for a moth performance, let me know!
June: Europe? Vancouver?
It’s looking like we might get to give a workshop in Aarhus! We put in a submission to the Bionic Blitz as well! Unclear yet if we will be around the Pacific Northwest or Europe. Anyone want to hire us to run some mothbox workshops in Canada or Europe?
July 17-19: Ohio Mothapalooza - Keynote
This is a really cool event in a beautiful forest in Ohio where we will hang out for 3 days looking at moths! I’m there to do a Keynote, but ill probably be mothboxing too!
July 20-28: Moth Week at the American Museum of Natural History
We will be having outreach events all week, and do a free Mothbox making workshop!
August: Invertebrates in Education Conference - Keynote
I will be giving the keynote at this cool conference: https://titag.org/iecc-conference/
November: Ohio - Entomology Society Meeting
I will probably go to the entomology meeting then!
https://entsoc.org/events/annual-meeting
YEAR OF THE MOTH
And lastly, celebrate Moths the whole year! We made an art challenge to create moth-y art from now until Mothweek in July! All you have to do is make the moth of the week in some kind of art form and share it around!
