Software updates - November 2019

The Cacophony team now have a weekly release cycle where new software is released to a test environment and tested software is released to production. You can view the engineers' release notes and their Trello board - that shows what they're working on. If there's anything you'd like them to be working on then please let us know.

Here's a summary of recent changes:

Cacophony Portal

• Improvements to the export functionality. This includes
• Ensuring the date in the CSV Export is in the correct format for your timezone - previously the date was in the US format which was frustrating considering all of our customers are currently in NZ (it was right 12 times/year :-). Incidentally if you want combine the time and date into one field in excel, you can just add them together.
• Including the location information to the CSV export. This will be particularly useful for those of you that move a camera around different spots (maybe every 10-14 days when you need to re-charge the battery) who then need to do reports on each different location.
• Changing the export function so it exports all of the results (up to 100,000) in your query rather than just the current page. This was a little painful before, you would have to increase the number of results per page and then combine exports if you wanted more than 1000 lines of data.

• Changed the Done button on the audio tagging interface - it now navigates to the next recording, rather than returning to the search.
• Bought back the delete button - so you can delete audio recordings. I find this particularly useful when I inadvertently record myself.

Thermal camera

• Some cameras have the ability to plug in a speaker, so you can test the impact of audio lures. We have enhanced the capability of this by adding support for offline operation, checking audio schedules more often so any updates are applied on the day they are configured and making the operation more robust. This includes some bug fixes:
• There is an option in the management interface (accessed via the Sidekick app) to test the speaker which wasn't working for some cameras. This has been fixed.
• For cameras with a speaker there are various reports on what sound was played when. There was a bug fixed with these reports when the camera was offline.
• The camera contains a contains a "real time clock" with a small cell battery. This keeps track of time even when the camera is off. There was a bug that meant this clock was drawing more power than it should and the battery was running out, causing problems for some of our older cameras. This has been fixed.
• The way the camera software updates has been improved to make it more robust.
• When you view the camera output on your phone you used to see the last still snapshot. Often this was confusing, so we have stopped showing this.
• The camera now has the ability to be turned on and off based on the sunset and sunrise times

 Bird monitor

• We have finished testing the ability for the Bird Monitor to auto update. This now seems to be working well. To enable this there is an option in the advanced setup to auto update the bird monitor. There is also the ability to manually update on the same screen. This should auto update from v1.7.7 and higher. If you have an earlier version, please contact us for instructions on how to update.

• We have changed the way the recordings are made during the day. Previously we were recording once every hour during the day and once every 10 minutes around dawn and dusk. We now record randomly which results in an average of 38 recordings/day. We made this change because it increases our chance of finding something outside the dawn or dusk chorus and it makes it easier to make statistical inferences.
• As part of this change we removed the option to change the frequency of recordings.
• We have also removed the option to update the location periodically. This option was for when we had the ability to record when you were walking. From my experience this mainly recorded heavy breathing.
• We have added in an additional option to record for an arbitrary length of time at sunrise, sunset, & noon. You can offset when the recordings starts. This functionality was added for the South Island  Kōkako Trust who are playing Kōkako calls and then using the Bird Monitor to record responses.