During a volunteer project, I ran into some stupefying experiences with camera traps, one of those 'corner stones', it seems, of nature conservation research. 

Everybody who works with camera traps knows it, but it was new to me, and I think it can't hurt to point out the glaringly obvious here:

They consume no less than 8 AA batteries per run. I've seen a project description boasting the use of 200 camera traps if I remember correctly. That is 1600 batteries and I sure hope they are able to retrieve every single one of them.

Secondly, the manual of the camera trap that I had purchased explicitly discouraged the use of rechargeable batteries. I tried it anyways and indeed, the camera seems to run shorter on them. Tip to myself for next time : download and read the manual first before purchasing.

Thirdly, in the country where I did the volunteer project it was completely unclear if there was a battery recycling system in place. It seemed to depend on the town and private initiative. The question now is to which extent camera traps for nature conservation are used in countries with a proper recycling system?

Fourthly, the project had a couple of camera traps that 'didn't work'. A few of these just needed some spraying with contact spray helped ( a whole different topic, but what is the environmental impact of contact spray? Does that weigh up to replacing the electronics? ). A few others seemed to suffer from the same problem. They contain a button cell that seems to power the clock and perhaps some other functions when the AA batteries are lacking. This button cell had gone bad, that is, rusted away. In the traps that I checked, the button cell was soldered to the electronics board. I had no means to replace them, so I do not know for sure that the faulty cell was the source of the problem. This really is a disclaimer, the camera traps seemed pretty old, and other things might caused the malfunction.

I found only one online source about these button cells in camera traps. It is listed below.

At least it indicates that this happens more often and that the cell is probably not rechargeable. If so, I find it a major design flaw. Would it not be better to make the button cells replaceable and /or rechargeable? Or do without them completely?

 

See 

Read "SOLVED: Identify faulty soldered PCB Lithium button cell replacement battery - Miscellaneous Electronics - iFixit" on iFixit

SOLVED: Identify faulty soldered PCB Lithium button cell replacement battery - Miscellaneous Electronics - iFixit

Hi @steveout , If the board is still working try measuring the voltage on the battery when power is connected to the board or disconnect the battery from the board and measure the voltage on the board at the battery connections to get the o/c voltage reading This should give you a good idea as to... - Miscellaneous Electronics

iFixit

Hi all! 

Just wanted to drop in and share that we're having a lot of discussions around sustainability right now, and we're thinking about how the conservation tech community can recycle old tools in sustainable ways. Swaps and exchanges feel like they fit perfectly into that conversation! 

If any of you would like to drop into this discussion thread on practical steps toward sustainability and share your experiences with swapping tools, we'd love to hear from you! 

Hi all doing some spring cleaning. Just pay shipping.

I have: 

-20 new Taoglas FXUB63 Ultra Wide Band Antenna 698-3000MHz we don't need.                                      The ones that come with Boron's.

-90 Phoenix Contact TERM BLK 4P SIDE ENT 5.08MM PCB                                                                       

-45 Omron RELAY GEN PURPOSE SPST 10A 12V, G5LE-1A DC12

We have so much stuff we'll never use. Will post more as I sort through it. If you need something in particular let me know. Might get lucky. 

If by chance someone knows where I could find some ATSAMD21G18A-MFT or similar let me know!

Quick report on what we're doing on the technical side:

First of all, so sorry that this has happened. We worked hard on spam prevention on the registration system and after lots of effort using many different methods, managed to cut that down to zero or almost zero. At least for automated "bot" accounts.

But the user account involved in this seems to have got by that and then used our bespoke messaging system to spam recently logged in users. From the facts that 

• it targeted recently logged in users (who appear in that order on the member directory) 
• the messages are spaced apart in time in a way that a robot would probably not do

I suspect this is a manual copy-paste spammer.

We're working on reporting tools and other ways to prevent this but for now we've changed the system so that messages from blocked users will no longer be shown in member inboxes.

Please continue to report spam issues to the WILDLABS team until we work out further solutions for reporting.

Any suggestions from other platforms you use on which reporting tools you find the most helpful will also be much appreciated. We'd love to fix this in a way that helps with any other platform abuse issues that might come up in the future as the community grows.

I haven't been affected, my quantities are small and they are all jellybean parts. nothing remotely exotic.

Yes, I am also having supply problems lately, not so much of components as of plates or other materials that I have to receive from Japan (;-), Australia, China, ... My impression is that bottlenecks are occurring in some parts of the supply chain. I imagine that the COVID and the shutdown of the Suez Canal for days did not help ...

Hi Steph,

Great to hear back. Yes, mostly working on forest conservation and fire in the West but also conservation finance (analog and automated platforms to leverage public/private funding) and remote sensing a fair bit. I need to get back to carnivores! How about you?

Best,

V