discussion / Biologging  / 16 June 2022

Virtual fencing / Kinetic energy harvesting / Holistic grazing

Hi everyone, Stephanie invited me to share some recent developments in Finalnd.

I'm David and I'm a mechanical engineer from Rijeka, Croatia, working as a Marie Curie postdoc at Tampere University, Finland, developing kinetic energy harvesters for terrestrial animals, specifically in this project - goats and cattle.

I've been also collaborating with Nofence the commercial pioneers of the breakthrough virtual fencing technology.

This is my c/p of  a post I shared yesterday on my LinkedIn profile. Let me know what you think!

Kind reagrds,

David

Take a look at the first virtual fencing Nofence collar in Finland! Breakthrough future grazing technology developed by Nofence and Oscar Hovde now finally applied, tested and analyzed in cooperation with Tampere University and holistic grazing expert and consultant Philipp Mayer @ the Mantereen Tila highland cattle farm. After my visit to Nofence in November we agreed to test one collar here in Finland so I could measure how the collar moves on the animal and analyze afterwards what are the main directions of acceleration which could be employed for the development of kinetic energy harvesters for future enhancing of Nofence's technology. Also Philipp would use the collar to test the use of the collar in his dynamic holistic pasture management strategies. In the first photo you can see the accelerometer mounted on the bottom of the collar (24h, 800Hz, +/- 16g's), and on the second the equipped collar on Meri. In the first map screenshot you can see the heat map of the collar in use where Meri overstepped virtual bounds set by Phillip. During this first day she received several sound warnings and subsequent electric shocks - while the second map shows the second day results where Meri stayed in bounds! She learned to associate the sound produced by the collar with the approaching virtual boundary! amazing technology! I'm keeping the acceleration results for me and Oscar ;)




This is a very cool idea! I've long wondered about kinetic energy scavenging in collars and you've done it! Well done @trubilo ! Any plans for tests on wildlife? 

Great stuff!

Cheers,

Rob

Hi,

Akiba! Thank you for the nice words. 

It seems we're technologically at a point where power dissipation of digital processors can match the kinetic energy harvesting (KEH) power outputs - and it's getting better all the time. It can get very depressing when talking about real intermittent power available from a KEH generator (range of hundreds of uW to single digit mW - and 0 when no movement). That's why it's important to build the application and sampling times around it - and vice versa. 

PS:

Great work with the soil sensors! I was playing around with the ThingsOnEdge cricket with the Dallas temp. sensor for my wife's compost temperature monitoring - it worked like a charm - but yeah - you need a Wi-Fi close by. It would be impossible for here to get precise compost turn-over times and consequently correct compost microbial-fungal composition without it!

So for someone very much not on the tech-side of conservation tech.... kinetic energy harvesting collars are using the kinetic energy from the animal's movements to power the collar? Or have I completely butchered that?