Hi Nigel. 
That's a very kind offer. I think currently github is the main repository I use for those kinds of documents. I like your idea and it'd be great to expand WildLogger out to a full featured data logger. The original intent of the design was as an educational tool to learn the programming concepts, but I didn't expect that people would deploy them in actual scientific applications. It's really cool. 

As for specs and hosting, I'd actually prefer to keep them on github which is a popular platform and gets around the funding side of things. I've dealt with formal software specs and requirements in a previous corporate life but I think the scope of many of the projects we are undertaking is small enough that formal specs might not be needed. For the scale you're thinking, you might want to discuss with the Society for Conservation Biology or the larger organizations that are trying to plan out a roadmap for conservation biology. 

Akiba

Hi Maxine. 

I totally missed this post, but we'll be doing office hours once we kick off the Arduino series. In regards to your questions, at this moment, I don't see any environment to program the Audiomoth using the Arduino IDE and platform. You'd have to use a standard toolchain to program them which may be a bit daunting. I also haven't spent much time with Edge Impulse so I can't really comment on it. 

It sounds like you're looking for a smart way to trigger your "audio trap" to record during a specific event. There may actually be a few potential solutions, especially if you are looking for human hunters. This could consist of motion detection, sound level detection, sound frequency detection (ie: chainsaws), photointerruption (think a chime when entering a shop), or many other ways. Perhaps we can discuss during one of the office hours. Or if you want to start a separate thread, it may be a good opportunity to brainstorm potential solutions. 

Hope that helps.

Akiba

Hi everyone, 

Thanks for joining us at the meetup last week! If you missed it, @TaliaSpeaker has just posted the recording and her fanastic notes from the meetup. In this one, she's also included a list of recommended reading, compiled from all the resources you were sharing in the chat.

There were some threads of conversation that came up that I'm interested to pick up here. If there are others, please do pop them below or use the reply ​as a new thread option below to break off into new discussions. 

1. Help offered vs Help needed

Every meetup we get people joining who share in their registration that they are either looking for projects to get involved in, or need to find tech savvy people to help them with specific projects. Meredith (@snapshot_serengeti) is nice example of this. She came to meetup needing to design and build novel field equipment, and wanted to know who she could partner with to construct the designs. She's now started a thread about her needs and is getting lots of help here. Likewise, @Carl_Emogor was looking for specific advice about tech for studying pangolins and has had feedback here. 

Q: Ideas for how we can facilitate this better around the meetups, or this good enough? Should we have a 'community announcements' thread attached to each meetup where people can say 'i can offer this'/'I need this'? Or is there a better way you've experienced elsewhere? 

2. Mapping the conservation tech ecosystem

This comes up so. often. I get asked to contribute to this sort of map every other week, and I know of a handful of exsiting spreadsheets being maintained by people that go some way to answering this quesiton for various parts of our community (specific tech, specific conservation challenges).  I think it's been raised every meetup as a good starting point, but it's been a  particularly strong point of discussion in this meetup and the next gen tracking tech discussion. So my question is,

Q. Who is interested in this and where do we start? Are there examples from other sectors/communities of this sort of thing? Do we need to build out WILDLABS with new functionality (e.g. beef up profiles , tags + introduce project pages) to make it real, or is there an easy first step we could do right now? 

3. Swap meet? 

@Rob+Appleby raised this after the meetup: 

Also, on a complete side note, I have about 25 used 9602 Iridium modems and patch antennas, that I am happy to donate to someone through WILDLABS, and possibly a few other useful bits and pieces if there's any interest out there? And it got me thinking that a "swap meet" or donation page could be a useful resource maybe? I was thinking about all those VHF and GPS collars sitting in cupboards and drawers around the world that could be recycled/re-used etc. And David mentioned his Trident donation... Just a thought. 

I think this sounds like a great idea! @Rob+Appleby - first step could be to take it forward and reply as a new thread  below, throw it out there and see if others are interested? 

UPDATE: Continued here

4. Specific space for sharing funding opps

@kemprachael, you raised this, could you elaborate a little more on what you were thinking? My first impulse is that it's totally possible and probably needed, but I'm curious to explore more about what you want from it. Is it a new group, is it just a test thread as a start? 

5. What is a platform? 

@Alasdair - you were keen to get into the details of the platform - to pull out what is needed and how to sustain each part. I'm up for it, this is one to break off into a new discussion? 

6. Financial sustainability of open source projects

@Freaklabs has made a great start getting into the depths of this discussion topic here. He's pulled the relevant questions from the list above and shared his perspective/experience in response to each one. It would be great to hear some other voices in response to the questions, so you're interested in the topic and have ideas/experience, check it out. 

7. Wildbook Q&A

TBC - there was obviously a LOT of interest in Wildbook, so we're talking with the team about having a specific space where you can get all of your questions answered. It'll likely be a thread - maybe live? - we'll keep you posted. 

Finally, if you have ideas for what you'd like to see in future meetups, drop them in this thread here. I've done a summary of where we're at in responding to requests to-date, and I've also shared the ideas we're throwing around for season three. They are by no means concrete, so now is the time to help shape them. 

Thanks

Steph

Q: Would both designers and customers both be interested in having a UK producer holding stocks of open source designs? (UK)

This is a really interesting question because rather than dealing with a business model from the point of view of a manufacturer, it's dealing with it from the point of view of a distributor. A distributor takes a portion of the markup of a product sale in exchange for selling the product through their channel. In many cases, it's quite a significant portion and is normally around 40 to 50% of the total margin of the product (if it's a distributor with it's own retail channel, ie: Sparkfun). 

When I work with distributors, I evaluate them based on the value-add they provide. For a distributor to earn their portion of the markup, they have to provide some unique service that will help increase sales or provide value to the customers of the product. For example, if they are skilled with the product and can handle both customer technical support and returns locally or in a local language, that's a value-add for my customers that I'm interested in. Or if they have large volumes of targeted traffic for the specific niche I'm interested in and can increase sales more than I could do myself, than that's also a value-add for me. 

If they're willing to purchase product and pay up-front or manufacture my products for their local market with a commission to me, then that's also a value-add to me. Most distributors accept products on consignment and pay out only when products sell. Unsold and returned products get sent back to the manufacturer. If they pay upfront or manufacture, the vaue they bring is that they absorb the inventory risk which means I don't have to. 

If it's just to sell my products through their channel on consignment without having a specific targeted local audience, then I'd have to really think hard about it. If I can do the same type of thing by just listing my products on Amazon and using Amazon's FBA service with local warehouses, then I'd rather do that and pay the fixed fee to Amazon. I can just absorb that into the final retail cost and since it's not a percentage of retail cost, it won't scale with the cost. 

So the answer is that if you're a middle man or considering using a middle man such as a distibutor, it's important to understand what value-add they bring and whether the margin they absorb is worth it. 

Akiba

Q: How to balance low cost and high quality (India)

Q: QA in open source solutions? (UK)

I'm going to address both of these questions together. In regards to the the first one, I think we need to clarify the definitions a bit since "low-cost" and "high quality" are very ambiguous terms. They'll mean different things to different people. I've addressed the term "low-cost" in a previous post, where I think there should be less focus on cost and more on value. That means providing a clear benefit/s to the target customer.  Cost is a dangerous game to play in where you don't really want a price war unless you have a clear strategy going into it. 

In regards to "high quality", this can also mean many different things. To some, high quality means rugged, high reliability, or a long usable life. To others, it means good customer support, documentation, and training materials. In terms of reliability, no matter the cost, you need to have a test setup, more likely some automated test setup. This would be a minimum in terms of quality and QA. You can get customized test jigs made using bed-of-nails and toggle clamps or you can make them yourself. It's then up to you to create the test software to automate the testing as much as possible. I would consider this a standard QA procedure, regardless of whether it's open source or not. 

In terms of quality, perhaps it could mean ruggedized which is highly dependent on the application. If it's going to be on an animal or in an environment where it will experience a lot of vibrational shock, then you'll need a vibration table or device to test it against to see where the statistical points of failure are. I've even used recycled massage vibration motors from motel beds to test parameter like this.

If it's going to potentially be deployed in the Antarctic or Sahara Desert, then you need to define a temperature range which covers these extremes and test for that. If you're selling your product at a cost that won't allow you to do this testing, or your customers aren't willing to pay for this kind of testing, what you can do is sell graded versions of your device. The standard version might have an operating range of 0 to 50 deg C which covers most applications. Then there can be ruggedized, graded, or premium versions which are tested from something like -30 to +85 deg C for harsher climates. These would usually require special environmental testing chambers which need to be rented or purchased.  

It's also possible that you might need to use special parts for these such ICs which are graded for industrial use. Many ICs have a commercial version and industrial version. These particular devices should of course cost more since they require much more thought, testing time and effort, and also more expensive components. 

No matter what, it's important to have documentation, support, and training materials for your products. Without these, it's unlikely you'll get much adoption. If you're selling things at a cost that doesn't value these things, then you probably have a pricing issue or you're focusing on the wrong types of customer. You don't want customers that only think about price above everything else. 

So perhaps I would say that rather than looking at high quality vs low cost, I think it's more important to focus on high value, which means features that bring benefits to your customers. This only comes from working closely with the people using your device, listening to them, and incorporating their feedback.