Hi, Synapse is a good option if you're looking for professionalism & speed, they're in San Francisco (and Seattle). It's a sister company to the one I work for in the UK so I could put you in touch with the right people if you're interested.

You can try Frank G.. He's a fantastically innovative engineer who founded and rubs the Maker's Space at Barstow College in Barstow, Calif. Frank is very familiar with complexities, needs, and budgets of field-based conservation. His email address is: number2gman@gmail.com.

HI Wayne. 

Sure. The main thing is selecting and interfacing the sensors that you'd need. If you had a water meter that fed out the data, then you could just timestamp it and log it to the microSD card. Otherwise, for the data you're looking for, it's likely you'd need a water flow sensor and water pressure sensor. Flow would let you know the rate of water flow in a pipe, ie: usage. Pressure would allow you to detect if a leak occurs (slight decrease in average water pressure over time) or burst (sudden large decrease in water pressure). 

At the moment, we're not actively selling the WildLogger since the chip shortage made inventory more precious. But if you email, we can arrange one if you were curious to try the course. 

Akiba 

Oh, that looks so good, and some heavy hitting design firms too!

I'd be interested in any camera monitoring setups that can be used inside a nest box. Most camera traps are too bulky for this purpose. All the devices I've looked at either need a wired connection or a wifi network to transmit images. I want one that can store all info to an SD card and preferably be solar powered. Obviously infrared or starlight sensitivity. Sound recording would be a bonus for some bird monitoring I want to do.

Done lots of this over the years and it depends on the species really. If you want incubation behaviour  and hence success or otherwise using temperature then the Thermocron IButton DS1921G is perfect. The new Blue Maestro is an option I became aware of this year but I haven't tested at scale.

In terms of cameras and endoscopes I've tailored many off the shelf products and built a few from scratch. When I get chance I'll have a look around and see what is still available.

Hurray !, we were waiting impatiently for it, now we can put our babys to sleep and let them only work what is necessary!
I've started to see a bit of the content, and as always, it's exceeding my expectations.
Congratulations on your excellent work!

Thanks a lot for the new module!
It now keeps logging and logging and logging....

Greetings from Austria,
Robin

Hi Nigel.

At the moment, I don't know of any other groups doing water monitoring. @JAL is doing a cave monitoring project. The DS18B20 is a nice sensor. It was the original sensor I was going to use for the Wildlogger kit before switching to the DHT11. One thing is that you may need to test how waterproof it actually is. When I took them apart, there was just a heat shrink tubing seal to the DS18B20 with exposed pins inside the stainless steel tube.  
I haven't had the chance to play with a DO sensor yet, but definitely hoping for more info once you deploy. It sounds like a fascinating project.

Akiba

Hi Nigel,

Are you interested in attended or unattended monitoring?  You can take inspiration from openctd, also the cave pearl project which has a few variants.  IMO the atlas instruments are probably the safest way to go.  Water quality sensors are frightfully expensive, and even Atlas sensors are spendy in my book.

I heard there was a chap calibrating DS18B20 units (NIST traceable) for USD20 or so, that would partially remove the accuracy issue (the 18B20 is accurate to 0.5degC only).  The 18B20 can come already waterproofed which is convenient.

Hi Jose.

I somehow missed this post. I can't fully understand the issue you're running into. Can you post the code you're using? Also if you can, perhaps a rough diagram of how you're interfacing the BLE HM-10 to the Wildlogger? It sounds like you somehow have it connected to the USB dongle interface? And then the other side of the Bluetooth connection is connected to the PC? It sounds like an interesting application.

Thanks.

Akiba

Hi Nigel. 

it makes sense that the batteries don't last long. Since we haven't discussed the power management part of the code, you're in active mode the whole time. The power drain will be high and you won't get more than a day or two of battery life. 

What you need is to disable any peripherals you're using and put the Wildlogger into powerdown (aka sleep) mode. Then use the real time clock to wake your system up periodically to take measurements, say every hour. That's actually going to be what we do in module 5 which I'm actually working on right before I took a break to check the interwebz. 

With the right power management, you should be able to keep the system going for a month or longer depending on the power draw of the sensors you want to use. With the DHT11, PIR, and SD card, we estimate around 2.5 months but that depends on the power draw of the SD card. 

If you can have some patience,we'll be working on and finishing out module 5 soon. We'll let you know when it's available. In the meantime, if you need to deploy soon, I recommend you check out the Low Power library for Arduino and look at the examples. 

Hope that helps.

Akiba