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Sensors / Feed

Want to talk about sensors that don't quite fit into any of our tech-specific groups? This is the place to post! From temperature and humidity to airflow and pressure sensors, there are many environmental sensing tools that can add valuable data to core conservation monitoring technologies. With the increasing availability of low-cost, open-source options, we've seen growing interest in integrating these kinds of low bandwidth sensors into existing tools. What kinds of sensors are you working with?

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WILDLABS Virtual Meetup Recording: Acoustic Monitoring

WILDLABS Team
The fourth and final event in Season 3 of the WILDLABS Virtual Meetup Series is now available to watch, along with notes that highlight key takeaways from the talks and discussion. In the meetup, speakers David Watson, ...

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WILDLABS Virtual Meetup Recording: Drones

WILDLABS Team
The second event in Season Three of the WILDLABS Virtual Meetup Series is now available to watch, along with notes that highlight key takeaways from the talks and discussion. In the meetup, Craig Elder, Dr. Claire Burke...

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Plant-Powered Camera Trap Breakthrough

Alasdair Davies
Microbial fuel cells, developed by Plant-powered Camera Trap Challenge winners Plant-E, have been used successfully with Xnor.ai's energy harvesting camera technology to capture what are thought to be the world's first...

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How do you weigh a live whale?

Fredrik Christiansen
How do we actually know a whale weighs 40 tonnes? After all, we can’t exactly capture an animal the size of a bus and simply put it on a scale. Fredrik Christiansen explains their new, non-invasive way of weighing...

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Instant Detect 2.0 emerges

Sam Seccombe
In the past six months Instant Detect 2.0 has physically emerged, with the first prototype systems built and ready for testing at the start of April. The ZSL team is now well into their optimisation and hardening phase...

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I am doing a research project on rhino poaching at Kruger National Park. I was impressed with the idea of Instant Detect 2.0. I do not know the cost involved with installing that...
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ESA Kickstarter: Environmental Crimes

European Space Agency
The European Space Agency’s “Environmental Crimes” thematic call offers support and funding of up to €60,000 per activity to companies looking to develop services tackling illegal water, air and land polution using...

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Conservation and Technology Conference

Bat Conservation Trust
The Bat Conservation Trust is hosting a one-day conference exploring conservation and technology for all wildlife (not just bats!) at the University of Nottingham this fall. The conference will bring together wildlife...

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From the Field: Melissa Schiele

In this From the Field interview, we talk to Melissa Schiele, a tech whiz, marine ecologist, and conservationist at the Zoological Society of London. She shares with us about her work helping to develop the first-ever...

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FLIR Conservation Discount Program

Hello All- I am a FLIR employee and excited that FLIR recently launched a Conservation Discount Program.  This was highlighted yesterday in the Funding Opportunities...

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Hi Montanamud,

Thanks so much for posting this. I'm Alasdair from the Arribada Initiative, working on the WWF / Wildlabs Asian Elephant Human Wildlife Conflict Challenge to develop an early warning system using thermopiles / microbolometers. We use the Lepton range of FLIR products. Do you know if Lepton modules will be eligable within the Conservation Discount Programme too?

Kind regards,

Alasdair

Hi Alasdair-

Currently the Lepton is not on the list.  If you would, please fill out the form on this webpage and request the Lepton be added - I will also bring it up and see if we can get it on the list.  

 

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funding

FLIR Conservation Discount Program

FLIR Systems, Inc.
FLIR announces the launch of their Conservation Discount Program, which offers projects the opportunity to qualify for a 30% discount on select thermal, visible, and maritime products. Share your conservation plan and...

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Meet the WILDLABS TECH HUB Winners

WILDLABS Team
In February, we released an open call for the WILDLABS TECH HUB, offering 3 months of support for solutions using technolgy to tackle the illegal wildlife trade. We were overwhelmed by an incredible 37 submissions,...

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Technology for Wildlife and the Looming Spectre of E-Waste

Laure Joanny
In this blog, Laure Joanny adds her perspectives to an ongoing discussion that we've been seeing in the community about conservation tech and it's relationship to e-waste. How do we tackle the challenge of battery waste...

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Suggestions or Preferences for content for this forum?

Hi everyone. I'd love to make this forum more active. Is there anything people would like to see here? Some ideas are: Explainers on IoT How-to articles on putting...

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Hey Akiba,

It would be great to have a conversation about what could be done in the field with IoT systems beyond virtual fencing and other current systems being implemented in conservation. Cases are great here but thinking beyond of what's the need and where could some creative thinking be applied to solve conservation problems. Thanks for getting this going!

Vance

That sounds awesome. Perhaps we start with that. Perhaps discussing some case studies of IoT being used outside of wildlife conservation (ie: enviornmental monitoring, etc), some theoretical applications of IoT that can be followed up with practical discussions on the implementation, or perhaps some hands on tutorials?

I'll start looking into some content ideas and please post anything you find, want to discuss, or would be more interested to hear about.

Akiba

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Starting an Open Source DataLogger Project

Hi everyone.  We're starting an open source datalogger project (yet another) for general purpose sensing and data collection we do here at hackerfarm. It will be used...

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and love your work MichalSmielak! Looks like a very nice design indeed. 

Hi everyone. 

It's still a bit early in the process but we have been working on two separate data loggers for the OpenWild toolkit. We're putting this out now so we can discuss the OpenWild tools for the virtual conference coming up on Tuesday. It's mainly to get a conversation started on an open source toolkit.

This datalogger is the one described above with all of the features except for the Grove sensor connectors. We decided that instead, we'll put Arduino compatible shield connectors and have different shields that can add support for specific applications. Here are the features for the OpenWild Datalogger 900M

  • Arduino compatible but with (16 kB RAM and 128 kB Flash)
  • Low power
  • Solar w/rechargeable batteries
  • SD card
  • Real time clock (DS3231SN)
  • Precision 2.5V voltage reference
  • Waterproof IP65 enclosure
  • 900 MHz Wireless radio (802.15.4)
  • 500 mW transmit amplifier, 12 dB low noise receive amplifier
  • Communication range of up to 5 km (depends on antenna & terrain)

The initial github repository can be found here. Please note it's still in a pre-release stage so software and everything else will be fleshed out as it gets closer to a 1.0 release.

Github Link

@Rob+Appleby : Actually an animal-borne datalogger would be really interesting. Will check that out after these two are working and released. 

We've also put together a variation on the wireless datalogger. We've found it extremely useful for us in other projects, especially in developing countries without much communications infrastructure except for cellular. This is the OpenWild Wireless DataLogger 3G-GPS. 

This can function as a standalone datalogger with a 3G connection to upload data as well as an SD card to have offline storage or backup of data. It can also be used as a gateway for other wireless sensors where it can aggregate the data from a local wireless sensor network and send the information via a 3G uplink. In this case, it will need a wireless shield (ie: 900 MHz 802.15.4 in the case of the OpenWild Datalogger 900M) to collect data from other wireless sensors. 

One of the main topics we'd like to discuss along with the OpenWild toolkit is how to proceed with showing how to operate and customize these tools. This might likely be from a series of videos, tutorials, and workshops. It's nice to design all this technology, but our experience is that the most important factor is showing people how these tools can be relevant in their field of work. 

But in any case, there's a lot of development effort going on at the moment and we're looking forward to putting together a base of tools specifically designed for wildlife conservation technology. It's really exciting and all of us at freaklabs and hackerfarm are interested in what's happening here.

Here is the feature set for the OpenWild Datalogger 3G/GPS (we actually need better names for everything but that will come later).

  • Arduino compatible but with (16 kB RAM and 128 kB Flash)
  • Low power (3G modem can be power cycled so that it can turn on only when used)
  • Solar w/rechargeable batteries
  • SD card
  • SIM Card
  • Real time clock (DS3231SN)
  • Precision 2.5V voltage reference
  • Waterproof IP65 enclosure
  • 3G WCDMA support (SIM5320 3G module)
    • Can support Americas, Europe, Asia. Need to know location to look up the frequency bands used by the country/region
  • GPS support

Software will be coming soon. Things are pretty busy at FreakLabs so we mainly wanted to crank out the hardware so we have something to work with. Then the software can come along as free time pops up. 

Github Link

 

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OpenEars is a fact!

Breaking news: We open sourced our Sound Event Recognition sensor and started working with IoT Sensemakers Amsterdam to boost its development and use. The...

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FYI: we included instructions in English: https://github.com/SensingClues/OpenEars

 

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camera trap sensor zones - how much is hardware and how much firmware

Hello all The passive infrared sensors on camera traps differ between makes and models and some of them are heavily biased towards movement in certain directions - Reconyx for...

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Hi Akiba,

Sure thing. An open source camera trap reference design or SoC that meets commerical specifications is, in my eyes, one of the key missing elements in the world of camera traps due to the complexity of achieving comparable performance as that of a Bushnell / Reconyx. Nobody has cracked it yet, and if you're game, that would offer real value to the camera trapping community. I'd be keen to support a move in this direction.

I  supported an experimental programme of work a few years back that multiplexed the SD card, meaning anyone with an existing generic camera trap would use the modified SD and the camera would happily keep the bus, writing data / photos, but the bus would be switched on init so the previous data could be read by a third party radio or device, meaning cheap trail cameras could be modified and used and extended. A flat ribbon cable escaped the enclosure in this instance. I was also going to try and run busybox (think WiFi-SD cards) for wireless transfer but the prob was power as the SD card only received power during writes and the objective was 0 hacks - just a modified SD in a standard camera. Could still go down the firmware route, but it gets heavy supporting various different makes. A reference open design and injection moulded case would be the real answer.

Cheers,

Al

Hi Alasdair.

I think an open source camera trap design is very possible. We've looked into the Sunplus chipsets but it seems very difficult to get a reference design and reference software. The SPCA1x28 series is a low end chipset that is very inexpensive, using an 8-bit 8032 processor and handling all the images in hardware. The low cost is likely why so many trail cam manufacturers use them, but the processor is based on an Intel 8051 instruction set circa 1981 and looks closely guarded by Sunplus. What seems to be happening is that companies are selling vanilla circuit boards with standard features and the trailcam manufacturers are using the standard features available in their trailcams with no modification of firmware. On the (Sun)plus side, having an 8-bit controller with 5MP cams means it's possible to idle at very low power and then turn on and trigger the cams quickly. 

We've looked at using an Allwinner chipset which is used in a lot of action cams and dashcams and modifying it into a trailcam. It's possible to run Linux and they support SD card interfaces and various cameras. It's also possible to buy just the chip so it's not tied to a platform like Raspberry Pi. This is useful because it's possible to make minimalist boards with just what's needed and also optimize it for power. An issue is that since it will be running a pretty heavy processor, it will be difficult to power optimize. Rough estimates are that at idle but full clock speed, the chip will consume around 90 mA. The Raspberry Pi Zero idles at around 80 mA for reference. Ideally, it'd be nice to get it around 1 mA.

We've also checked out using an ST32 ARM Cortex M4 chip with a parallel camera interface. These are pretty beefy processors but not Linux class like the Allwinner which is an ARM Cortex A7 class chip. Since the ST32F407 chip can run closer to bare metal (ie: no OS layer in the way), its possible to put it in very low power modes and then have it wake up. One issue though is that it doesn't have an SDRAM interface so it will cost a lot to have enough SRAM to buffer more than one image. 

Another possibility we were looking at was to have an FPGA running with custom logic and have it controlled by something like an Arduino or an ARM Cortex M3. There is already ArduinoCAM devices but the FPGA code is not open source. This is also a potentially interesting possibility because it would offer a low power device which could be in sleep mode except for the PIR sensor and quickly ramp up to take pictures. 

Whether we go with the Allwinner, Sunplus, ST, FPGA, or some other chip, it will probably be a big undertaking since hardware will need to be developed for the chip and system. The software will probably take the most time since custom drivers will likely need to be written as well as application software to handle the main functionality. I'm currently assuming that it will be a year-long project. But if it takes a year to come up with a design that can be useful in so many applications, it may be a small price to pay. 

Let me know if you're interested to discuss it more. I will probably move this part of the thread to a separate thread since I think it's diverged from the OP topic. 

Akiba 

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HWC Tech Challenge: Smart Parks field update

Smart Parks
As a winner of the Human Wildlife Conflict Tech Challenge, Smart Parks is working in partnership with the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and WILDLABS to develop a smart solution that uses the power of the Internet of...

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Great introduction to IoT

Gary Atkinson, Director of Emerging Tech at ARM, gave a great presentation (with just 2 hours notice!) about IoT at the Fuller Symposium a couple of weeks ago. It's well worth...

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The talk is really interesting and I agree that it's important to think about the bigger issues of the world and then use technology as just one of the tools to try and tackle them. 

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