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Autonomous Camera Traps for Insects / Feed

Camera trapping for insects is becoming a reality using advances in camera, AI, and autonomous systems technologies. This group discusses the latest advances, shares experiences, and offers a space for anyone interested in the technology, from beginners to experts.

Group curators

Tom August
Computational ecologist with interests in computer vision, citizen science, open science, drones, acoustics, data viz, software engineering, public engagement
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discussion

From Scratch Tutorial on AI Object Detection

Andrew Quitmeyer

10 July 2024 2:32pm

Earlier I had put out a call for help: Anyone wanna teach me to Yolo? (Offline) trying to figure out how to set up an offline machine learning system to train on our own custom...

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Lars Holst Hansen

8 November 2024 11:21am

I believe you can indeed export detections as json files - but I have yet to try it out myself! I have more than 500k events with images from our data collection and test of the polar bear camera alarm in the zoo, so I need some automated tools to assist with going throug and prepare the data for training.

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discussion

Mothbox Updates v4.12

Andrew Quitmeyer

11 September 2024 5:27pm

We have been super busy deploying another dozen mothboxes around panama while also adding cool new features! So i have a backlog of updates to post about! So here's a bunch...

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Kim Hendrikse

15 September 2024 6:51am

Super effort. Nice reporting!

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discussion

Mothbox Public Release

Andrew Quitmeyer

11 September 2024 4:56pm

Yay! We finally got all our documentation refined, and after dozens of iterations and updates we are happy to finally publicly release the mothbox! Please share...

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discussion

Auto-Wake a Pi5 without a Pijuice! (Mothbox)

Andrew Quitmeyer

25 April 2024 5:44pm

MotivationReplicate the functionality of a Pijuice with just a Pi5 and a $5 battery!Like many folks here, we use a Pijuice on the Raspberry pi on the...

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Robin Sandfort

6 June 2024 9:45am

Hi Andrew,
this is great! 
Did you consider the Witty Pi 4 L3V7 Real Time Clock (RTC) und Power Management Modul für Raspberry Pi?
(This one has no included battery) or the one with the capacitor?

Greetings from Austria,
Robin

Rob Appleby

28 June 2024 3:39pm

A fantastic solution @hikinghack ! Those Pijuice boards are more expensive than the pis themselves! 

It already sounds as if you've gotten the power use in sleep down a long way, but I thought I'd mention the Adafruit TPL5110 timer boards. They get draw down to around 20uA. They are limited to a 2-hour max interval so won't be useful for applications that only wake up once or twice a day etc., unless you write a script with something like a counter to count off multiples of wake up times. They are also controlled by resistors, so the timing won't always be perfect. When it's finished, our TimeLord board will allow a lot more sophisticated scheduling, be precise and I am pretty confident it won't cost anything like the juice! If you'd like to take some for a spin when they are ready just let me know (and same for anybody else).

I really like that pis and some Arduino's are including RTCs now (although the Arduino R4 internal RTC is crystal-less so might not be super accurate, not sure about the Giga)...makes things that little bit easier and less expensive.

Well done on the great solve!

Cheers,

Rob

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discussion

Testing, Deployment, Solar, Conferences - Mothbox update v3.21

Andrew Quitmeyer

24 May 2024 8:46pm

The last two months have been bustling with fun mothbox developments!Deployment in AzueroOur first full deployment went wonderfully! Andy and Kitty trained @Hubertszcz  's...

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Julian Richardson

3 June 2024 10:35am

Thank you for the detailed post. This is amazing! 

 

Have you experimented with ways of reducing power consumption? How much of the power is used by the LEDs vs the RPi? You could try having the LEDs on for less time, or less bright. 

 

Julian

Andrew Quitmeyer

4 June 2024 7:54pm

The LEDs use most of the energy, the UV leds are about 12-15 watts. the pi hangs out around 3 watts. and the white flashing LEDs use about 10 watts each, but we reduced their time to like .8 seconds for a flash photo, so they aren't as much of a big deal.

 

you basically need a lot of power to make a really bright thing to attract the bugs, but we are testing out some more efficient UV leds

Julian Richardson

5 June 2024 10:23pm

I was thinking that you might be able to reduce the amount of time the lights were on by blinking them, but this paper seems to show that flickering mostly reduces the number of specimens attracted, though it affects some orders more than others, and, rarely, it increases the number attracted. On the other hand, the numbers of  insects captures only seemed to go down by around 50% even with quite extreme flickering (10% duty cycle I.e. light only on 10% of the time) and if that had a big effect on how long the battery lasted it might be worth it, as you could run more capturing sessions between charges.

 

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article

New WILDLABS Funding & Finance group

Frank van der Most

5 June 2024 3:24pm

WildLabs will soon launch a 'Funding and Finance' group. What would be your wish list for such a group? Would you be interested in co-managing or otherwise helping out?

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Alex Rood

5 June 2024 4:14pm

This is great, Frank! @StephODonnell, maybe we can try to bring someone from #Superorganism (@tomquigley ?) or another venture company (#XPRIZE) into the fold!
Paul Edonga

6 June 2024 1:38am

I find the group to be dope, fundraising in the realm of conservation has been tough especially for emerging conservation leaders. There are no centralized grants tracking common...
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discussion

Insect cameras in The Inventory

Tom August

1 May 2024 9:26pm

So... WildLabs just launched the Inventory and there is a SERIOUS lack of insect cameras on there. So, a call out to this community to get that fixed!@Max_Sitt...

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Luca Pegoraro

2 May 2024 2:02pm

Hey @JakeBurton , nice work with The Inventory! 

 

This is very aligned with some internal efforts going on in our community to map out devices, but also data and models eventually. It would be great if we find a way to make this two interoperable. We are still in the (very) alpha development phases, so it is quite open, but it would be super helpful to have some insight about the under-the-hood data structure that The Inventory is relying on, so we can figure out good ways to reliably map or info onto them. 

Happy to chat further or set up a meeting! 

 

@qgeissmann👀

Jake Burton

3 May 2024 2:13pm

Thanks very much @LucaPego! Just to clarify, 'Products' does cover hardware, but it also includes software and databases as well. Basically anything that you can take and use in your work. Sounds like we should also be including models in that as well!

It would be great to see more databases and software listed and reviewed on there. We would also be interested to learn more about your internal efforts in your community and what overlap there is for sure. Could we set up a meeting?

Luca Pegoraro

16 May 2024 3:16pm

Hey there @JakeBurton , sorry, I did not see your message! 

Why don't you shoot me an email with some tentative availability to luca.pegoraro (at) wsl.ch, and we take it from there? 

 

Again sorry for the delay! 

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article

Introducing The Inventory!

Jake Burton

1 May 2024 12:46pm

The Inventory is your one-stop shop for conservation technology tools, organisations, and R&D projects. Start contributing to it now!

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Jake Burton

22 July 2024 10:55am

Hi @hjayanto ! I've given your account the ability to edit without earning the badge just to save time while we figure out why you aren't getting your Sprout Badge, so you should...
Herdhanu Jayanto

23 July 2024 2:05pm

Thank you @JakeBurton . Looks like I wasn't in community base group, instead misunderstood it was the same as thematic group. I have added our organization. Appreciate your help!
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discussion

WILDLABS AWARDS 2024 – MothBox

Hubert Szczygiel

15 April 2024 5:06am

 We are incredibly thankful to WILDLABS and Arm for selecting the MothBox for the 2024 WILDLABS Awards.  The MothBox is an automated light trap that attracts and...

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Andrew Quitmeyer

19 April 2024 12:00pm

Yeah we got it about as bare bones as possible for this level of photo resolution and duration in the field. The main costs right now are:

 

Pi- $80

Pijuice -$75

Battery - $85

64mp Camera - $60

which lands us at $300 already. But we might be able to eliminate that pijuice and have fewer moving parts, and cut 1/4 of our costs! Compared to something like just a single logitech brio camera that sells for $200 and only gets us like 16mp, we are able to make this thing as cheap as we could figure out! :)

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discussion

Mothbox + Mothbeam Update: 4

Andrew Quitmeyer

31 January 2024 7:09pm

Prepping for DeploymentIt's been mega busy at dinalab here in panama as me, Kitty, and @Hubertszcz prepped for his big field deployment in western panama.We finalized our designs...

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Andrew Quitmeyer

15 February 2024 4:49pm

We did some more testing with the Mothbeam in the forest. It's the height of dry season right now, so not many moths came out, but the mothbeam shined super bright and attracted a whole bunch of really tiny things that swarmed a lot

 

 

and some nocturnal bees

 

you could also see the mothbeam's aura from  far away in the forest! so that was impressive!

I also tested out attaching a 12V USB booster cable to the Mothbeam, and it works 

 

nice! So you can attach regular USB 5V battery packs to the mothbeam as well!

 

 

 

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discussion

Underwater camera trap - call for early users

Xavier Mestdagh

13 December 2023 11:44pm

Hi!The CAMPHIBIAN project aims at developing an underwater camera trap primarily targeting amphibian such as newts, but co-occurring taxa are recorded as well such as frogs, grass...

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Xavier Mestdagh

23 January 2024 1:21pm

Many thanks for your contribution to the survey! We are now summarizing the list of early users and making our best to propose a newtcam to all in due time. 

All the best!

Xavier

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