Hi Jackson,

Attached a few images showing how we attach the koala drop-off to collar material. The first shows the bare nichrome-acrylic plate with the nylon line in-situ. There's also a picture of an actual koala drop-off with the line exiting the plate. Lastly, the triple overhand knots (repeated so the knots are doubled over and secure) tying the line through the collar material. Normally, we hide the nylon by splicing the collar material in half, tying the knots, and then gluing the collar material back together so no nylon is exposed. 

Does all that make sense? Any questions just let me know.

Cheers,

Rob

also, we noticed our BoM was missing from GitHub, so we've added it now: https://github.com/Wild-Spy/OpenDrop/blob/master/Documentation/OpenDrop_BOM.xls

the drop off paper

https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/2041-210X.13231

Hi,

Does your system work with normal VHF tags or do you make a custom tag for use in your system?

Does the drone have to be piloted manually in a particular path or pattern in order to acquire the tags?

Or can your receiver be placed on say a fixed-wing high speed drone programmed to fly a lawn mower pattern to cover the maximum amount of area?

I'm also curious how you are doing the direction finding, since there are no visible antennas, but I understand if you'd rather not talk about this (c:

Interesting work, thanks.

-harold

Hi all,

Great to see this post continue to mature. Some good news for you all. Arribada has finished developing a lower cost open source Argos ARTIC R2 transmitter design with our development partners Icoteq for a National Geographic project. All thanks to @ThomasGray_Argos who originally gifted us 3 R2 development chips to work on an open reference design.

It's compatible with the Arribada Horizon GPS tracker, or cellular module if both are required in one device / unit. We'll look to integrate one of the LoRa radios from the Open Collar initiative too to create a comprehensive open solution that can be tweaked to form a viable pangolin tracker based on the attachment and epoxy designs above (thanks for the paper @Robin+Poches  , great research).

However, first up is Bangladesh for some open ocean plastics tracking.

More info here for now - https://www.icoteq.com/icoteqs-argos-satellite-transceiver-now-certified-by-cls/

Cheers,

Alasdair

Hi jjinsing,

You could take the 9 axis LSM9DS1 sensor from the Horizon tag (open source) + firmware and build a  custom module. Your limitation will be the coin cell battery and switching to a smaller microcontroller to get the size and weight down. What's the weight of the hummingbirds? 11g odd?

There is a tarantular tracking project that requires a similar sized tag (bluetooth base stations to track), so if that gets built you could inherit that in the future. Htarold is correct in that actual location will need a local rfid / base station at the feeding station to know where they are and you'd be looking at behavioural and energetics logged to flash etc.

Cheers,

Alasdair

Hi Jay, Alastair,

Small world!  You've got a great resource at your doorstep then (c:

Your idea of tracking the birds between known feeding locations is a good one, and it's made use of here.  But I don't know if the drift will cooperate over that long a period.  A colleague who looked into cheap accelerometers for navigation told me it doesn't work after 10 seconds or so.  But this was some years ago and things may have improved.  It might be possible to detect when a bird is stationary, to zero the device.  This is like when a fireman puts his foot down in the above case.

Thanks,

-harold

Hello Mike

If I understood your system description correctly, you intend to analyse the radio data and produce the heatmap on board the drone. Why ?

I would do minimal data processing onboard, log any relevant details onto  removable memory such as an SD card and do all further processing offline on a PC.

This should dramatically reduce the energy and processing demands of your drone-based hardware and simplify the software, too.

I guess there must be (open source?) solutions available that can convert data in a suitable format into a heatmap. This should save you having to re-invent that wheel.

Hope this is of some use.

Good luck,

Joachim Neff

Hello Mike

I am not sure whether a datalogger would resolve radio noise problems. I would expect more success from improving the antenna/receiver circuitry to get rid of the noise before you digitise/record. Unfortunately, I can't give you much advice on this subject but antenna/circuit design can be tricky.

I just watched your YouTube clips and noticed in the last clip that there seems to be a 40 dB margin between the transmitter signal and the background noise. Based on my limited experience, this should be plenty to clearly separate signal from noise. With the right type of signal conditioning/filters you should be able to log only the signal you are interested in. Record this together with the current location coordinates and you should get close to the data set you need for producing the heatmap.

Good luck,

Joachim Neff