Despite critical advancements in the tech solutions available to conservationists around the world, many existing tools are cost-prohibitive in the landscapes that need them most. Additionally, those who create low-cost and open-source alternatives to pricey market tech are often operating on tight budgets themselves, meaning they have limited resources for the promotion of their solutions to a wider market. We need increased communication around these solutions to highlight their availability, share lessons learned in their creation, and avoid duplication of efforts.
This group is a place to share low-cost, open-source devices for conservation; describe how they are being used, including what needs they are addressing and how they fit in to the wider conservation tech market; identify the obstacles in advancing the capacity of these technologies; and to discuss the future of these solutions - particularly their sustainability and how best to collaborate moving forward.
Header image: Shawn F. McCracken
Early-career movement ecologist currently working with an interdisciplinary team to develop and deploy animal-borne tracking devices with the interest of monitoring and studying the fine-scale behaviors of large carnivores, particularly in the context of human wildlife conflict
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- @frides238
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Hi! I am Frida Ruiz, a current Mechanical Engineering undergraduate student very interested in habitat restoration & conservation. I am excited to connect with others and learn about technology applications within applied ecology & potential research opportunities
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World Wide Fund for Nature/ World Wildlife Fund (WWF)
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Technologist, birder, photographer and mountain guide.
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- @vandita_shukla
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PhD candidate studying drone flight planning for enabling tracking and identification of individual characteristics of wildlife; member of the WildDrone, an MSCA Doctoral Network funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe research
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Movement Ecologist studying the where, why, and how animals move throughout our world. Current work is investigating the movement and energetics of large neotropical bats in a changing environment with ephemeral resources.
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- @aleontiou
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Over 35 years of experience in biodiversity conservation worldwide, largely focused on forests, rewilding and conservation technology. I run my own business assisting nonprofits and agencies in the conservation community
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- @Jeffm
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- @fsanger
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- @snapshot_serengeti
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Fauna & Flora
Conservation, Innovation, Education
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The Innovation in Practice edition of Methods in Ecology and Evolution is still seeking proposals about conservation technology
6 March 2023
Article
Rainforest Connection (RFCx) is bringing back the Arbimon newsletter for 2023! We're excited to share new features and tools of the platform, what's coming up, and some insights into our projects on bioacoustic...
23 February 2023
Technology to End the Sixth Mass Extinction. Salary: $104k-144K; Location: Washington DC or Seattle WA, potential hybrid; 5+ years of Full stack development experience; Deadline March 15th - view post for full job...
10 February 2023
Careers
Join the Arribada Initiative! We have a unique opportunity for a software developer to create mobile / desktop applications and intuitive user interfaces that assist researchers and fieldworkers to conserve wildlife.
16 January 2023
Using satellite imagery to detect and classify the severity of cyanobacteria blooms in small, inland water bodies.
15 December 2022
As the FieldKit hardware ecosystem grows, Conservify is seeking a Junior Electrical Engineer to assist with testing, troubleshooting, prototype development, and developing production test fixtures for our growing...
9 December 2022
Careers
Conservify is seeking a hands-on Senior Software Engineer with front end and back end experience developing rich web and mobile applications, and a strong desire to build a best-in-class product that stands out in both...
9 December 2022
Conservify is seeking a hands-on Senior Product and Production Manager with strong interpersonal and organizational skills to remotely lead a small seasoned team of thinkers, designers and engineers who are shaping the...
9 December 2022
Conservation partnership launches new award to advance biodiversity conservation from space
5 December 2022
Boost cons tech capacity at an international NGO! Fauna & Flora International is offering a paid three-month internship to consolidate and share best practices for the application of emerging hardware and software...
26 August 2022
Careers
Job opening at ARISE, an innovative program in the Netherlands to build a digital infrastructure for biodiversity data and services
19 August 2022
November 2023
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Description | Activity | Replies | Groups | Updated |
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At IUCN, we are collecting examples of best practices and case studies of tech use in and around protected and conserved... |
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Open Source Solutions | 2 years 3 months ago | |
Hi Wildlabbers! Tomorrow Shah Selbe will be our Tech Tutor and guide us through how to turn an innovative conservation tech... |
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Open Source Solutions, Sensors | 2 years 7 months ago | |
Hi Akiba, Just found out from the marketing dept at my work the cost to host multiple specs - very expensive [$NZ 7K-10K]. Host it on GitHub for starters then. I... |
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Open Source Solutions | 3 years 1 month ago | |
Amazingly nice offer! Thanks! I know how projects can sometimes be stressful. I had a bit of that feeling lately when having to figure out how to code a trap alarm my... |
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Open Source Solutions | 3 years 1 month ago | |
Hi skatewing, I'm not a domain expert like most people in this forum, but I have created XML schemas using object oriented (OO) principles in the past; the same capability... |
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Open Source Solutions | 3 years 3 months ago | |
Hi Akiba No worries, thanks for responding! I'd love to delve into more detail on this once the new series has started and I have an idea of the tools and kit required!... |
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Open Source Solutions, Sensors | 3 years 9 months ago | |
Hi Maxine, There are pros and cons to switching regulators and linear regulators. Linear regulators "throw away" the excess voltage in order to maintain a... |
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Open Source Solutions, Sensors | 3 years 9 months ago | |
Hi Luci. Did you ever get a response on this? I'd be interested in collaborating and helping develop out the system. We can probably assist in the manufacturing and... |
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Open Source Solutions | 3 years 10 months ago | |
Hello, Ours is the SensorStation: https://github.com/cellular-tracking-technologies/SensorStation/ It is a multi-channel radio receiver based on Raspberry Pi for a variety... |
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Open Source Solutions | 4 years 9 months ago | |
Hi Marysia, Naturebytes is a good start, there are a number of projects running using their Raspberry Pi wildlife camera traps. Kind regards, Alasdair |
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Open Source Solutions | 5 years ago | |
Daaaamn! That's a great list. Akiba |
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Open Source Solutions | 5 years 1 month ago | |
Excellent Akiba, Thank you for your detailed thoughts and for sharing your experiences. |
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Open Source Solutions | 5 years 1 month ago |
Financial Sustainability of Open Hardware Projects
12 April 2019 12:44am
12 April 2019 5:18am
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.
15 April 2019 12:08am
Excellent Akiba,
Thank you for your detailed thoughts and for sharing your experiences.
Sustainability of open source projects - a look at Octobox.io
28 January 2019 4:01pm
20 February 2019 11:11pm
Hi @cshclm and @heidi.h
I must say, I was delighted to see that you both joined this thread as I was actually about to start using Camelot to manage the collection of camera trap data to support the building of a machine learning / neural net model for Asian elephants, both optical and thermal. I won't go in to too much detail as I'll post an official update in a few days time on Wildlabs, but I wanted to quickly share my reasoning for selecting Camelot as it may be interesting (this was before you both posted);
- I could customise the sighting fields / meta. This one feature is powerful as now I can add "distance to target animal" or whatever I needed, safe in the knowledge that I could build a solid database.
- If I needed to get under the code, I could.
- If I like it, I'd be interested in supporting it or contributing financially too to support your time if I needed a certain section changing or a bespoke tweak - why? It's more time efficient to ask you to make a technical change to achieve what's needed and write this in to the project grant than myself spending 10x the time and not concentrating on the larger picture and delivery of the project itself.
- Because it was open source and because I could include it in a larger library of other open solutions (hardware & software) safe in the knowledge that it would exist regardless of grant based sustainability.
Expanding upon your thoughts and comments above, it made me think how my reasons to use Camelot may be different to a traditional camera trap user, or someone only needed the built in functionality. Could it be that the default, already very good, already well thought out ability to control and customise the software delivers out of the box? It may be a reason as to why you haven't seen a desire to fork or fix anything that needs urgent attention - then again, my desire to use Camelot is different, as I had a private intention specific to my project - and that may be a good path for you to follow if you can attract others willing to contribute for their special projects, that ultimately pays a little salary and feeds back features to the core. A kind of "freemium" model as described by @Robert+Hutchinson but with a price tag for your custom support and time to help projects that need / write in funding to advance the tool for their own needs, but share it on openly by default could be something to explore.
11 March 2019 3:44am
Great thread!
Though I don’t develop open source conservation tech myself (to date!), I’m quite interested in how this space evolves, for software but perhaps even more for the hardware side, given the intrinsic challenges of working with a physical product. My interest extends to the issue of viability: what does it take to make these great initiatives float, and how/who should fund them. As a quick intro, I’m founder (and current president) of the SCB Conservation Technology Working Group, which is keen to promote open source tech development, as Alasdair mentioned.
I enjoyed reading this thread. It was great to see Alasdair’s perspective (which I knew from past discussions) as well as others’. And I found out about Camelot (and your struggles to keep it alive), which I didn’t know before, but I’ll definitely check :-)
Alasdair’s Arribada Initiative is a great experiment, and a very necessary one. This is mostly uncharted territory for open conservation hardware. Last year, I organised a workshop with Andy Hill and Peter Prince (of AudioMoth fame) on roadmapping an open-source acoustic platform. We had a discussion with ~40 participants with interest and experience in wildlife acoustic monitoring and asked them what they’d like to see in an open acoustic platform (e.g. could be an extension of AudioMoth). We also discussed about the concept of open source technology (here, mostly hardware and associated control software) and realised that many of them hadn’t thought about the implications of open source, including the (by default) lack of product warranty and support. If, as an experiment, the Arribada Initiative works, how can we (as a discipline) support more of its services? We have an opinion piece (currently in review) suggesting the value of an intergovernmental entity (or entities), given the benefits would transcend individual projects/organisations (yeah, I know, good luck setting that up!). Interesting discussion, and one we should have collectively.
Two other (related) exciting discussion points:
- I find commercial open source conservation technology to be a very exciting space, plenty of challenges but also opportunities. The example of the company Arduino comes to mind – plenty of cheaper (legal) “copy” products but these guys are still operating. Of course, the context is very different to a hypothetical open-source conservation tech device (think AudioMoth) but would be interesting to look deeper into a few examples within the hardware world.
- Can commercial companies co-exist with cheaper open-source products? Is there a niche for higher-end more expensive company-supported devices when one can buy way cheaper ones? I think there is scope for some degree of niche differentiation that keeps commercial companies alive in this brave new world. What do you think?
10 April 2019 7:30am
Hi jlahoz.
In reply to your questions:
"I find commercial open source conservation technology to be a very exciting space, plenty of challenges but also opportunities. The example of the company Arduino comes to mind – plenty of cheaper (legal) “copy” products but these guys are still operating. Of course, the context is very different to a hypothetical open-source conservation tech device (think AudioMoth) but would be interesting to look deeper into a few examples within the hardware world."
It sounds like there were a lot of people asking questions about financial sustainability of open source hardware for last night's virtual meetup. I've been involved in open source hardware commercially for over 12 years now. I helped LadyAda set up her first assembly line for Adafruit, was a board member of the Open Source Hardware Association, and watched the open source hardware community as it went through it's evolution to what it is today.
Commercial open source hardware is definitely viable and doesn't necessarily need to be artificially sustained by grant funding. That said, you do need to understand basic principles about business and manufacturing if you are going to survive as a manufacturer.
I think the most basic mistake I often see beginning manufacturers make is moving straight to design and production without marketing. Marketing is the most important part of maintaining a financially sustainable business, no matter open source or not. What usually happens is people often overestimate the demand for their widget and get a large amount made and assembled. They then discover a critical mistake or feature that they overlooked because they didn't work closely enough with potential customers. For the AudioMoth, this seems like it was mitigated by working closely with the acoustic survey community and also verifying demand ahead of time using the Group Gets platform.
Beyond marketing, it's not enough to design working hardware. The first working version is just the start of an iterative process to either bring the manufacturing cost down or improve the feature set of the device. As the cost comes down, the margins improve and those cost savings can either be passed on to the customer to be more competitive (if there's a lot of price competition), reinvested into the company to improve capabilities (ie: buy an automated pick and place machine or hire employees), or kept as profit.
For FreakLabs and Hackerfarm, we have our own automated assembly line which allows us to manufacture specialty or low-volume production runs, usually up to around 100 boards. Beyond that, we normally send it out to an assembly house in China. We focus on production of custom designs for specific consulting projects but also run a small webshop with some of our mainstay products.
When we design, we design for both functionality and production. When possible, we normally select parts that are commonly found on motherboards, mobile consumer electronics, or otherwise are commonly found in the wholesale markets in China where many of the other low cost manufacturers source parts for their products. The reason why is that if a part ends up on a motherboard or cellular phone other than the main processor, it's basically a commodity product and the price has already been driven into the ground.
For example, the MCP73831 lithium-ion charging IC from Microchip is about $0.43 in quantities of 100 from Digikey. The equivalent TP4057 lithium-ion charging IC commonly found in consumer tablets and mobile USB chargers is about $0.03. It's also a part commonly found on projects by Adafruit and Sparkfun. All of us have purchasing and shipping agents in China to source and ship parts to us from these wholesale markets.
The average markup for a design at Arduino, Adafruit, or Sparkfun is usually 4-6x the BOM (Bill of Materials) cost. For example, the BOM cost for an Arduino Uno is around $4.5 and the price at the Arduino webshop is $22 for a markup of ~5x. I would say the minimum markup for a manufacturer would be 3x the BOM cost, not including assembly cost since we all have our own assembly lines. You're pretty close to break even at this point if you factor in shipping, packaging, handling, testing, development expenses, and time. I normally wouldn't do a project below this markup since there are often more productive uses of time.
I also used to teach manufacturing to industrial designers at MIT Media Lab and my friend bunnie Huang and I would do an annual six week tour in Shenzhen, China where we took students from MIT Media Lab to various factories, had them design and manufacture a product "almost" from scratch, and let them understand the realities of production and how it differs from design.
If you're interested to hear more about manufacturing and sustainable business models for open source hardware manufacturers in conservation tech, let me know. It's actually very do-able.
"Can commercial companies co-exist with cheaper open-source products? Is there a niche for higher-end more expensive company-supported devices when one can buy way cheaper ones? I think there is scope for some degree of niche differentiation that keeps commercial companies alive in this brave new world. What do you think?"
Oh of course. Truthfully I don't think it is too difficult to compete with cheaper open source products, especially from low cost "pancake" factories in China. They have the name "pancake" since they crank out designs like pancakes. The most powerful tool a manufacturer has is the ability to write. If you're manufacturing an open source tool and you're a native English speaker, I think theoretically you shouldn't have any problem competing with a low cost Chinese knockoff company. People don't just buy a product, they buy the story behind the product. If you can write in native English, you have a tremendous advantage over a company that does not have that ability. If someone buys the cheaper product with no documentation, no story, and no recourse if there's a problem, you don't really want them as a customer.
This is where marketing becomes very important. Every company has a "right customer", which is someone who feels like the products are tailor made for them and understands the mission of the company, the purpose, story, and is willing to support the company and products. This is especially true for conservation tech which has a very strong purpose and story. Focusing on these customers and building relationships with them when you find them is one of the most important things you can do. Trying to win sales from people who only want the cheapest price is a losing game. It's much better to focus on blog posts, customer support, documentation, learning materials, case studies, and help them understand how the product makes their life better in some way. There's little chance any knockoff company could compete with that.
There are a lot more strategies along these lines, but if you're an indie manufacturer without economies of scale, you want to avoid focusing on price as much as possible. Price is something you compete on when you don't have anything else going for your products. If you have a well thought out marketing, pricing, and differentiation strategy, then things should work out quite well.
Anyways these are some thoughts on manufacturing in general and open source hardware in particular. Having open source designs and source code is an advantage rather than a disadvantage but the rest of the business model also needs to be aligned with this. Open source hardware businesses are based on community and this is where the focus should be. This also includes customer support. With this in mind, I think there are plenty of opportunities in conservation technology for sustainable open source businesses because of the passionate community around it...and even more so if you think of parallels to other industries.
For us (FreakLabs and HackerFarm), we also work in developmental infrastructure monitoring with World Bank and open source agriculture technology. There are uses for a lot of conservation tech in those areas (ie: dataloggers, wireless sensor networks, general purpose timers, timelapse/camera traps, etc). This also helps us in designing conservation technology. We know there are crossover markets that could potentially use these products or slight variations of them. Also wildlife conservation fits in thematically with many of our efforts to work with technology in a specific context and purpose. This is why we're really excited to be part of this community. We're looking to contribute in a way that can benefit the community but we have to make sure it will also benefit us. In that way, our contributions and participation can have longevity and be sustainable.
Hope that answers your questions :)
Akiba
OpenWild - Timer: An Open Source General Purpose Timer
3 April 2019 4:50pm
Field Instruments: Build it yourself (article in Nature)
22 May 2017 3:05pm
12 April 2019 2:02am
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