discussion / Camera Traps  / 15 February 2018

Recommendations Needed: Camera for remote work using Irriduim for image upload

Hi all,

 

I'm looking for advice on companies that can provide me with a camera to be deployed on a sub-Antarctic island. It's not for counting, it is more of an awareness and education raising project (it will show an albatross nest over a year). It will need to have good battery life, or preferably solar, and needs to upload images via Irriudium or something similar. There will be people close by but I can't rely on them to upload the images. I need to source this by July. Does anyone have any ideas of who to talk to? I've been in touch with ZSL but I think the lead in time may be too short for them.

 

Thanks in advance!




Hi swinnard,

we have built a system this year for Arribada Initiative http://blog.arribada.org/ that is working closely with ZSL that implements the functions you require to a large extent. The Arribada FMP device is open source open hardware and you can find more details here: https://github.com/IRNAS/arribada-fmp

The device has the following features:
* Solar powered
* Built-in camera
* RockBlock Iridium modem
* WiFi and LoraWAN communications (not required in you application)
* Ultrasonic distance sensor (not required in you application)

We have built a version of this device for Arribada Penguin monitoring: https://github.com/IRNAS/arribada-pmp which captures images hourly on Antarctica of penguins and stores to the SD card, without the Iridium comunication.

Note that the cost of Iridium system may be prohibitively expensive, see http://www.rock7mobile.com/products-rockblock

2000 credits for 800GBP will give about 100MB of capacity, which can translate to about one photo per day if a compressed resolution is sufficient. A full HD image will for example be 2.4MB. 

A more optimal method would be to take a photo several times a day, process them using OpenCV or other image processing library to determine if the image is interesting and then send it via Iridium. This can save some data as well as generate interesting photos. All of them can be stored to the SD card and retrieved at a later point.

Dear All

 

Our group in Australia has developed a device for monitoring wild dogs/dingoes in remote areas and have a fully authomated system using Iridium and or 3-4G if available. This device is officially called Wild Dog Alert Node and will be capable of being deployed into remote areas, gathering image data using a unique sensor system, processing the image and sending it to the cloud where it is identified as a wild dog-dingo and an alarm is immediately triggered. In our case it is to prevent predation on livestock but this technology could easily be modified for any species. The R&D is being refined and we are expecting to start disseminating information soon in both scientific papers and general media https://invasives.com.au/research/wild-dog-alert