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Acoustics / Feed

Acoustic monitoring is one of our biggest and most active groups, with members collecting, analysing, and interpreting acoustic data from across species, ecosystems, and applications, from animal vocalizations to sounds from our natural and built environment

discussion

Recording problems with Audiomoths

AlexHolm

30 December 2018 9:57am

Hi guys I'm currently in Mauritius where I've done acoustic monitoring of Mormopterus acetabulosus for the last couple of months, trying to figure out what habitats it...

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AlexHolm

2 January 2019 3:00am

Hi David

Thank you for your answer. I'm using 2000mAh Fujitsu R06 batteries. When configuring the AudioMoths, daily energy consumption is said to be 72mAh. The batteries should last for at least 20 days. I've never had them deployed for more than seven days straight (and they even did the zero lenght files at deployment for only three days). Maybe the energy consumption calculator in the configuration program is faulty?

Where can I find the firmware?

Alex

2 January 2019 7:49am

Information and links to the new firmware and the app is here https://www.openacousticdevices.info/single-post/2018/12/12/Version-120---New-Firmware-and-Config-App-Now-Available.   Note: there is a possiblilty of the update failing and the recovery proceedure is here https://www.openacousticdevices.info/support/device-support/device-bricked-during-firmware-update.

With batteries it is also to do with voltage decay as well as power. There was a discussion Nov 2017 about voltage limits and it was said that SD cards get a bit twitchy at less than 3.3v but the rest will still be operating at around 3v - I can't find any data on R06 however in general voltage drop is influenced by temperature, dicharge rate, age/no of recharges etc etc - your are right it may not the batteries but there is a possibility it might hence my suggestion.

I'd suggest also posting on the AudioMoth support forum, to see if anyone else has seen this issue and has a fix.

Cheers

David B

2 January 2019 10:01am

Forgot to say - if you are having trouble reformatting SDcards on Windows- the project suggests this programme http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index.htm?guiformat.htm.

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discussion

3D printed audiomoth cases

Robin Jones

18 December 2018 10:14am

Hi, I've made an initial attemp to design a 3D printed case for an audiomoth (with 3 x AAA battery pack) and have made it available on the thingiverse (https://www....

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event

Ocean Hack: San Francisco, 10-11th September, 2018

One Ocean Collab

20 August 2018 12:00am

A 48 hr pop up innovation lab for the ocean, bringing together a mix of designers, strategists, technologists, engineers, scientists, marine conservationists, educators, artists and buisness talent to co-create...

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discussion

Audiomoth Group Purchase (Round 3)

Alasdair Davies

5 February 2018 12:02pm

Hi everyone, We are really pleased to see that there is more demand for yet another Audiomoth group purchase! We wanted to let you all know that a third purchase is...

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Alasdair Davies

11 April 2018 5:26pm

Hi all,

Do to the success of Round 3 (hitting its target 15 days early and reaching the stock limit) we have started to explore the possibility of launching a 4th round, with a shorter time frame (probably 15 days) and with a limit of 250 devices. This will all come down to component stock, and finding it, so we'll update you next week (16th April) once we have confirmed it's possible.

Kind regards,

Alasdair

Stephanie O'Donnell

23 April 2018 5:36pm

Quick update from @alasdair - 'The 4th round of AudioMoth will go live Mon 30th April and there will be 250 made available. This has been made possible as we need to manufacture all those from round 3 and 4 at the same time whilst we await a stock re-order of a component.' 

Alasdair has promised to post the time it goes live as it's bound to fill up quickly, given how fast the third round sold out. Stay tuned!

 

 

Alasdair Davies

23 April 2018 5:53pm

Hi Stephanie, thanks for the update above. We will be doing two things this week to support the community. To meet the demand from Round 3 we require an essential component (MOSFET) and so we are planning to;

1) contact the 110 backers from this round (3) to ascertain how many have field trip deadlines and work with CircuitHub, the manufacturer, to see what's possible to meet deadlines - i.e identifiying other stockists of the missing component, or possibly an advanced run with the stock available now for those with an urgent deadline.

2) Launching a 4th Round on Monday 30th April with 250 devices available. This will have a shorter run time of 14 days and is possible as it will end shortly before the delivery of the stock needed to complete orders from both round 3 and 4, allowing us to help those who couldn't get in to round 3.

All the best,

Alasdair | Arribada Initiative

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discussion

Group purchasing of the AudioMoth (Round 2) is now live

Alasdair Davies

7 December 2017 2:07pm

Hi everyone, We've started the second group purchase of the AudioMoth. It's running from the 7th of Dec 2017 - 7th of Jan 2018. Delivery will be the...

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Alasdair Davies

5 February 2018 11:36am

Hi everyone, we have received an update from GroupGets on the shipping of the second group purchase. 

'Quick update everyone. The boards are scheduled to ship to us from Circuit Hub on Feb 12. We will promptly ship out once we have them. The lead-time slipped due to the large amount of orders. Thanks for being patient!'

For those with small orders, your order will come to us at Arribada first and we will ship out from here. This greatly reduces the import taxes to you but will mean a small wait.

By taking part in this group purchase you have hugely reduced the cost per device for everyone involved. Thanks so much for your patience.

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discussion

Bird Bioacoustics

Carlos Abrahams

16 October 2017 1:23pm

Hi,  myself and colleagues organised a workshop last July on developing bioacoustic techniques for bird survey and monitoring.  The presentations from the meeting are...

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Stephanie O'Donnell

10 January 2018 2:44am

Hi Carlos and others working on bird bioacoustics, 

@SteffenOppel flagged a new issue of Avian Conservation and Ecology that might be of interest as it nicely intersects with what you were looking at in your workshop and follow up survey. This issue is about Advancing bird population monitoring with acoustic recording technologies, and is available here. 

Presumably you've closed the survey now, did you get useful feedback from it that complements the information collected from delegates? What are your next steps for this work? 

Cheers, 

Steph

Carlos Abrahams

11 January 2018 10:02am

Thanks for that Steph - and for the link in included.  A good set of papers there, and the review by Shonfield & Bayne on 'current use and future application' is really useful.

The SurveyMonkey should still be open for people to add to - and some good additional feedback has already been gained on my initial proposals for a survey protocol.  The next step for me is get this written up and published in CIEEMs In Practice in the next couple of months.

All the best,  Carlos

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discussion

Group purchase of the AudioMoth from Open Acoustic Devices imminent

Alasdair Davies

16 April 2017 1:32am

Hi everyone, It has become apparent that a number of us (ZSL / Institute of Zoology / UCL / NGOs / independent PhD students etc...) each need about 50 - 100 AudioMoths for...

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Nilaksha Rathnayake

5 December 2017 10:01am

HI Alasdair,

pardon me if this is irrelevant, do you know any device which we can use to record low frequencies like sounds of elephants etc? I don't think AudioMoth is capable. I'm just trying to find such a device/technology. 

kind regards!

Nilaksha

Alasdair Davies

6 December 2017 6:55pm

Hi everyone,

Good news! The second group purchase is going live this week. We've been preparing things with GroupGets to get it live, so I'll post the link to the campaign for those who want to get their hands on a device. I may start a new thread for the second round as this one is getting a tad long.

@nilaksha - do you have a specific frequency range you'd like to target in regards to your elephant research? The AudioMoth may already be capable if you can let us know your target.

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discussion

Acoustics for Human-Wildlife Conflict Prevention, Anti-poaching, and more

Jan Kees Schakel

27 April 2017 5:28pm

Dear friends, We made some noteworthy progress with our SERVAL-sensor, which stands for: Sound Events Recognition for Vigilance and Localisation. As the recognition-part...

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Jan Kees Schakel

2 November 2017 2:20pm

Hi Chris,

thx for sharing your ideas. We indeed cracked the problem of recognitizing sound types and to deploy a trained convolutional network model on a RPi. The information we process includes dB-levels per audio band, thus, yes, that is also possible on a RPi.

The current version of the sensor can 'talk' LoRa and GPRS, but that was the easy part. If necessary, we can install a local LoRa-network. We have our own one running around our office. 

Power consumption is the actually the limiting factor in terms of for which problems you can or cannot apply the SERVAL technology. We are developing it to mitigate HWC-situations, as these are by definition within the zone between nature and culturalized land. Power is less of a problem in these zone, because we can detect elephant rumbles and tiger roars on several km's distance.

Thus, the sensor is ready, but the data processing and learning is not. At this moment we are searching for funds or volunteers to help us process the recordings. Once that work is completed, we are ready for the field ;-)

Chris Nicholas

2 November 2017 4:16pm

sign me up as a volunteer!

:-]

Being a Cornell grad, I have a Raven Pro license.

agreed, power is everything. Again, with the GPU-accelerated FFTs, is it perhaps possible to run the algorithms on an RPI A, or perhaps even a Zero? Or is this done via Raven batch mode?

I'm quite interested to acoustically detecting human activity in general; i.e. trucks, motorcycles, gunshots, chainsaws, and with hydrophones, motorboats, but also collect/harvest vast amounts of data in super-remote places for TEAM, as per: http://www.teamnetwork.org/about , and generally target the SMART folks of: http://smartconservationtools.org/smart-partnership/  I'll be at the World Bank in a few weeks for: http://conferences.iaia.org/wdc2017/  , with the goal being to find a sponser to pilot this sort of thing for biodiversity monitoring.

(and while we're burning power, perhaps discriminating bipeds vs quadrupeds visually, as per: https://github.com/wzyuliyang/RaspberryHOG, https://www.pyimagesearch.com/2015/11/09/pedestrian-detection-opencv/ ..?)

Anyway, extremely good to find you.

How can I participate?

Chris
 

Jan Kees Schakel

2 November 2017 5:03pm

Great. Let's continue our discussion that through Skype ;-) My skype name is jkschakel and you can email me at jankees.schakel@sensingclues.com. 

I'm available on Tuesday or Wednessday night (Amsterdam time) or Thursday. Could you please send me an email with your skype name and some cv or whatever for me to orientate?

To answer your other questions:

- Yes, we do use Raven (light) to extract the sound samples.

- No, we don't use raven on the RPi, and because it has to analyse sounds in realtime, the Zero is (currently) not powerful enough.  

- crunshing and analysing the numbers is done on the RPi, but we bypass visualisation. The output is a numerical class (representing e.g. chainsaw, elephant at circa 1000m, etc) which is transmitted to the rangers.

- We certainly share our interests - let's see how we can join forces. We have cracked the techno aspects and know how to create the model, but have not yet found a sponsor to fund that labour. Help in terms of funds or hands-on time is highly appreciated!

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article

HWC Tech Challenge Update: Meet the Judges

WILDLABS Team

20 October 2017 12:00am

Our panel of international experts has been hard at work reviewing the 47 proposals we recieved for innovative technological tools to address human wildlife conflict. The panelists have systematically been assessing the...

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discussion

Imagery request

Paul Glover-Kapfer

6 March 2017 11:55am

Hi All, Does anyone have some acoustic monitoring imagery they would be willing to share? Imagery will be used for best practice guidelines and supporting website, and will be...

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Stephanie O'Donnell

15 March 2017 4:27pm

Hey Paul, 

Emma and Paige have also given the go ahead to use their photos, they also have some other photos you might be able to use! 

@WILDLABSNET Absolutely, I'd be more than happy to help. I've got lots of photographs from my acoustic monitoring projects. Thanks!

— Emma Checkley (@EmmaCheckley11) March 8, 2017

@WILDLABSNET Yeah, I've definitely got some of those lying around!

— Paige A. Byerly (@paigebyerly) March 8, 2017

Carlos Abrahams

16 October 2017 1:18pm

Paul,

 

Hi - is this still needed, as I'm sure we could provide something relating to birds, bats and cetaceans?

 

Thanks,  Carlos

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discussion

New R package: 'soundecology'

Steffen Oppel

7 February 2017 3:17pm

In a recent review about future directions in soundscape ecology I came across a new R package called 'soundecology', which might have some promising features. For...

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Carlos Abrahams

16 October 2017 12:51pm

Steffen,

Thanks for that tip-off, I'd not seen that paper before. One of the speakers at my bird bioacoustics meeting in July covered soundscape ecology, with some interesting data comparisons of the different metrics.  His presentation is on our website if you would like a copy?

Also, I've just emailed Danile Hayhow about the work on capercaillie I've been doing in 2016 & 2017- recording lekking calls to see if an activity index compares with standard survey methods.  I'd be very keen to talk this over with yourselves at the RSPB in preparing the journal publication, as it will incorporate the survey data from 2017 collected by RSPB Scotland staff.

Thanks, Carlos

 

 

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discussion

Elephant communication translation

John Probert

14 August 2017 2:30pm

Good morning! I just came across this exciting elephant communication platform. It is from DSWT, utilizing decades of elephant research, and allows people to write human...

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Courtney Dunn

6 September 2017 10:47pm

Wow, this would be amazing to continue on with the years of data I have from tigers! I understand their social lives are very different but it would be interesting to see what other species could be highlighted on a platform like this.

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