Hi Doug. 

We often work in remote areas like rainforests, desert, Australian outback, etc so we often have to develop custom hardware. We haven't seen anything that fits our needs in a budget range that could accomodate the projects that we work on. 

We've since gottenr requests to make the devices publicly available but are still working on finding time to document and set up the manufacturing for them. 

However you may be interested in one of the designs we've been using in the Middle East and  Australian outback. It's for 3G cellular communications and has inputs for a solar panel and rechargeable batteries. We're manly using it to connect periodically to a cell tower and upload data it collects from other wireless devces (LoRa) in the area. But you can also use it for streaming if your solar/battery capacity is large enough. 

If you're interested us, please direct message us on WildLABS and we can discuss more and perhaps set you up for pre-release hardware. I've included some pics below:

Akiba

Hi Doug. 

It's actually an interesting application, however it might actually be cheaper to try and put together an off-the-shelf solution rather than go custom. There seem to be some livestreaming trailcams that might give you what you want almost out of the box. The Spartan GoLive trailcam seems like it might do this. Also other animal webcam setups seem to use a combination of WiFi security camera + a WiFi-LTE modem. This might actually be the cheaper and quicker way to go.

I do think that having a cellular streaming camera setup specifically for wildlife is a really interesting design. Trailcams are generally designed for camera trap functionality so I suspect the live functionality would be an afterthought. I'm curious if they have to deal with things like heat and recovering the stream after the communications goes down. 

In our designs, we assume a very resource constrained environment, ie: no power sources, little or no connectivity, etc. So looking at a design where it's specifically expecting a power source (ie: dedicated large solar panel) and good/decent cellular connectivity with the design focus on uptime might be something interesting to pursue. 

But for now, I recommend checking out the live trailcams or a wifi security cam + LTE bridge setup. And if you're interested in a dedicated solution specifically for wildlife cams, I'd love to discuss what the requirements would be. It might be super useful for wildlife orgs and parks to build awareness and improve funding,as well as benefit the research and conservation community.

Akiba  

That's such a cool list. Thanks for posting it!

Akiba

Hi,

Maybe try sourcing from Aliexpress?  I an't speak to the quality, but at some price point it becomes worth looking into this option.

-harold

Hi Michelle, I've worked on a few arboreal camera trap surveys so I might be able to share some information. With other researchers we've been working on a paper that reviews the current state of arboreal camera trapping, methods, recommendations, and what to expect in the upcoming years. It's still in review, but I'm sure most, if not all, of the authors will gladly help you with any questions you might have.

I've seen footage of pangolins in canopy cameras (https://twitter.com/rewild/status/1272904442061492226), try contacting @masselouxgarou and @thereal_jayhay on twitter. If you have any specific questions, let me know and perhaps I can point you on the right path!

I just did a quick search and it doesn't look like there's a place where you can ship them in Mexico. However, at least in Mexico City, there are a bunch of collection sites for old electronics and batteries (see below- sorry the link it's in Spanish).

https://www.dineroenimagen.com/hacker/estos-son-los-centros-autorizados-para-tirar-tus-pilas-usadas-en-cdmx/108084

I know you have a lot of batteries, but have you consider taking some back with you? That's what I've been doing with our empty batteries, bring them back from Madagascar to Canada. 

Hi. 
Apparently it's a common problem with Spypoint cameras. I recommend checking out this thread and testing out the reboot procedure.

Akiba

One barrier that was discussed in the presentation was the "risk" or uncertainty of a payoff when talking to potential funders. It seems to me that the "risk" factor of collaborations like this, for funders, would be analogous to the investment and payoff when developing a genomics program. Relative to traditional field research, it takes a much greater investment in time, with different expertise, to create a reference genome for a species of interest and then pull SNPs, etc. Nevertheless, funders seem to recognize the potential for genomic research and genomic tools. Do you think that greater openness to “risk” in conservation genomics results from closer intellectual proximity (i.e., molecular biology vs organismal biology), or to conservation genomics being a more mature field (i.e., more examples of success), or to other factors? If intellectual proximity is a key factor, then conservation tech collaborations will continue to face this barrier, but if lack of successful examples are a key factor, then perhaps this barrier will become less of an issue for conservation tech in the future. Thoughts?

Hi. Just watched the Youtube version (I'm in the unable to watch live hemisphere) and wanted to say that was a great talk. I wish it could have gone for another hour. I liked hearing about the issues and concerns from Melanie on the biology/ecology side. Also could totally relate to what Ed was talking about from the tech side about how it's difficult to have long term collaborations since there isn't really a conservation technology career path at the moment. 
I think one of the things we're trying to do with courses like Build Your Own Datalogger is to get people involved in wildlife/conservation side more comfortable with the tech. The goal is to hopefully build a shared repository of technical knowledge that people in the wildlife community can contribute to and benefit from. 

Akiba