Hi everyone, 

If you want to find out more, join Adam Benzion, co-founder of Hackster.io, @Tim+van+Dam , co-founder of Smart Parks, @smaston Founder of Project 15 at Microsoft, and Rex St John from Arm  today 9am PST for a livestream to talk about the #ElephantEdge Hackathon.

They'll be talking about how this collaboration came to be, how to get involved, and how developers and makers can get involved to unlock challenges facing our Earth and help the scientific community advance in their projects by contributing our technology skills to these efforts.

Join here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dOaHrtlMec

Steph

Hi Everyone, I'm Anthony Lindley, a PhD candidate at the University of Southampton. I mainly work with computer vision but would like to branch out and try other ML applications.

I love elephants and having only recently got to grips with the scale of the threat to their existance, feel very strongly about this competition! I'm really keen to meet other people who'd potentially be up for collaborating with me or forming a team. Please contact me on twitter at @ajwl27 and we can come up with a plan!

Really looking forward to the solutions everyone comes up with here and of course, I hope that this actually makes an impact in the wild and helps protect these beautiful animals.

Hi Wildlabbers,

We'll be using this thread for all follow-up questions and ongoing discussions after tomorrow's episode with Ineke! If you haven't registered yet, make sure you get your ticket here.

As always, we'll update this thread after the episode with the full tutorial and Q&A on our Youtube channel. We'll also share our collaborative notes and resources gathered from the episode's chat.

See you tomorrow for what will definitely be an exciting episode!

-Ellie

Hi Wildlabbers,

Ineke's episode is up on our Youtube now! Follow this link or watch it below. You can also find our collaborative notes from this episode here (where you'll definitely want to check out Ineke's handy glossary!).

Ineke's happy to answer more questions, so ask away in here!

-Ellie

It sounds interesting. I've been trying to find coverage maps for Starlink but so far, I haven't found any actual coverage maps. I seem to just find "planned" coverage maps. It's hard to see how these would get used for wildlife tracking at this moment. The initial devices will use an antenna that's 0.5 meters in diameter which for me, would be approximately from the base of my foot to my knee. 

I think power consumption and coverage will also be main factors if the system gets used. Based on other satellite communications designs, the system would have to be pretty large by animal tag standards, even without the antenna, due to the batteries required to handle the maximal current. It would be interesting to test out some modules for this technology, though.

FYI for whoever's interested, you can sign up to be a potential beta user. More info here.

Akiba

This is something I was thinking about recently as well. It is my understanding that the reciever antennas are fairly large. I think, however, there will be some very interesting things that can be done with starlink. If you could do your tracking with some type of antenna network and send the data to the reciever then star link gives you a high speed connection with which you could do near real time data processing.

Hi all,

Starlink is Ku and Ka-band as they are targetting broadband, so you're looking at similar large(ish) transmit / receive dishes as traditonal VSAT, and they will POE-based so lots of power required for the links. Kineis (Argos), Lacuna, Iridium and ICARUS are the main contenders in my eyes over the next 5+ years.

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 assembly as well. Let me know if you're interested.

Akiba

Here's a video and a pic of a field fail on a project we did with Dr. Meredith Palmer. We designed and built an automated behavioral response system (ABRS) where we would play a sound when a camera trap was triggered and then record the video of the animal's response to it. Unfortunately the hyena's response to the sound of a prey was to eat the audio system.

Here's a link to the last video captured by the system:
https://youtu.be/h7SsuzAeJ5U

And here' s a pic of the aftermath:

Cool stuff Laurens! I'm closely following the open collar developments which triggers some ideas on what we could do for the river dolphins. Look forward to connect shortly! Cheers

Hey Laurens, 

How did your field tests in Rwanda go? 

Steph

Hi. I've been following the opencollar initiative and was wondering what the current status is. The project looks amazing!

Done. Good luck with the survey :)