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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.

discussion

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

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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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

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

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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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

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

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

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

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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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👀

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?

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!

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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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...
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

 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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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

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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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

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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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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discussion

Testing Raspberry Pi cameras: Results

So, we (mainly @albags ) have done some tests to compare the camera we currently use in the AMI-trap with the range of cameras that are available for the Pi. I said in a thread...

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And finally for now, the object detectors are wrapped by a python websocket network wrapper to make it easy for the system to use different types of object detectors. Usually, it's about 1/2 a day for me to write a new python wrapper for a new object detector type. You just need to wrap in the network connection and make it conform to the yolo way of expressing the hits, i.e. the json format that yolo outputs with bounding boxes, class names and confidence level.

What's more, you can even use multiple object detector models in different parts of a single captured image and you can cascade the logic to require multiple object detectors to match for example, or a choice from different object detectors.

It's the perfect anti-poaching system (If I say so myself :) )

Hey @kimhendrikse , thanks for all these details. I just caught up. I like your approach of supporting multiple object detectors and using the python websockets wrapper! Is your code available somewhere?

Yep, here:

Currently it only installs on older Jetsons as in the coming weeks I’ll finish the install code for current jetsons.


Technically speaking, if you were an IT specialist you could even make it work in wsl2 Ubuntu on windows, but I haven’t published instructions for that. If you were even more of a specialist you wouldn’t need wsl2 either. One day I’ll publish instructions for that once I’ve done it. Though it would be slow unless the windows machine had an NVidia GPU and you PyTorch work with it.

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discussion

Update 3: Cheap Automated Mothbox

Wanted to share a final set of updates on the work we have been cranking on here in Gamboa, Panama making this inexpensive portable night insect surveyor! There's been a lot of...

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This looks amazing! I'm currently work with hastatus bats up in Bocas, it would be really interesting to utilize some of these near foraging sites. Be sure to post again when you post the final documentation on github!

 

Also, Gamboa......dang I miss that little slice of heaven...

 

Super cool work Andrew!

 

Best,

Travis

Great work! I very much look forward to trying out the MothBeam light. That's going to be a huge help in making moth monitoring more accessible.

And well done digging into the picamera2 library to reduce the amount of time the light needs to be on while taking a photo. That is a super annoying issue!

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discussion

Project introductions and updates

Tell us about your project!If you are just starting out with autonomous camera traps for insects, or if you are a seasoned expert, this is the place to share your...

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Hi all! I'm part of a Pollinator Monitoring Program at California State University, San Marcos which was started by a colleague lecturer of mine who was interested in learning more about the efficacy of pollinator gardens. It grew to include comparing local natural habitat of the Coastal Sage Scrub and I was initially brought on board to assist with data analysis, data management, etc. We then pivoted to the idea of using camera traps and AI for insect detection in place of the in-person monitoring approach (for increasing data and adding a cool tech angle to the effort, given it is of interest to local community partners that have pollinator gardens). 

The group heavily involves students as researchers, and they are instrumental to the projects. We have settled on a combination of video footage and development of deep neural networks using the cloud-hosted video track detection tool, VIAME (developed by Kitware for NOAA Fisheries originally for fish track detection). Students built our first two PICTs (low-cost camera traps), and annotated the data from our pilot study that we are currently starting the process of network development for. Here's a cool pic of the easy-to-use interface that students use when annotating data: 

A screenshot of a computer

Description automatically generated with medium confidence

                                                    Figure 1: VIAME software demonstrating annotation of the track of an insect in the video (red box). Annotations are                                                           done manually to develop a neural network for the automated processing.

The goal of the group's camera trap team is develop a neural network that can track insect pollinators associated with a wide variety of plants, and to use this information to collect large datasets to better understand the pollinator occurrence and activities with local habitats. This ultimately relates to native habitat health and can be used for long-term tracking of changes in the ecosystem, with the idea that knowledge of pollinators may inform resources and conservation managers, as well as local organizations in their land use practices. We ultimately are interested in working with the Kitware folks further to not only develop a robust network (and share broadly of course!), but also to customize the data extraction from automated tracks to include automated species/species group identification and information on interaction rate by those pollinators. We would love any suggestions for appropriate proposals to apply to, as well as any information/suggestions regarding the PICT camera or suggestions on methods. We are looking to include night time data collection at some point as well and are aware the near infrared is advised, but would appreciate any thoughts/advice on that avenue as well. 

We will of course post when we have more results and look forward to hearing more about all the interesting projects happening in this space!

Cheers, 
Liz Ferguson 

HI, indeed as Tom mentioned, I am working here in Vermont on moth monitoring using machines with Tom and others. We have a network going from here into Canada with others. Would love to catch up with you soon. I am away until late April, but would love to connect after that!

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