Software updates

The team at The Cacophony Project are constantly developing the products they are working on. They currently have a team of 3 paid engineers and have had around 30 people contribute to the open source project so far. Each week they will release software and most of this will be automatically updated. So, just like a Tesla the products keep getting better. 

They release notes about weekly software updates across all the Cacophony Products. The notes can be fairly technical and often the updates are fairly minor. From time to time I'll give you an update on these and try to explain them in layman terms.

The software that is updated includes:

  • The Cacophony Portal
  • The Thermal Camera 
  • Sidekick (the android app for managing the Thermal Camera)
  • The Bird Monitor

Releases over the past month include:

Thermal Camera

  • added support for reading the battery voltage so we can eventually report on the capacity of the battery
  • added the ability to indicate whether or not the camera is connected to the wifi via the LED light on the outside of the box and cleaned up the configuration of the wifi.
  • Reduced the amount of power that is used when the camera has a modem
  • The camera has a function where if there is video being almost continuously recorded then we reduce the frequency of recordings. The most common situation where this happens is when the camera is in front of a live capture trap with a predator in it. We have made changes to this functionality to make it easier to understand and configure.

Cacophony Portal

  • Various changes in the back end to allow customers to give the camera a name themselves. At the moment this is a manual process but now that 2040 is manufacturing and selling cameras this needs to be streamlined.
  • When a thermal camera video is processed we now have the ability to detect multiple animals being tracked in a single video. We have done work to reprocess old videos and where possible keep any manual tags (indicating which animals were seen)

Bird Monitor

  • We have introduced the capability for the bird monitor software to be updated automatically. This is currently being tested.

On top of this we have made various bug fixes and security enhancements.

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