2040 Newsletter

Kia ora,

Welcome to the 2040 newsletter. As a reminder, we are the manufacturing partner for The Cacophony Project. We have lots of updates about the DOC AI Cam, including: the release of the new audio bird monitoring functionality.

The DOC AI Cam is one of the most sensitive and labour efficient tools for monitoring a wide range of predators. This thermal camera is one of the tools that DOC have used for a rat incursion on Motutapu Island. Here's an example of a rat video where the ranger received a notification within minutes of it being detected.

The team at the Cacophony Project are continuing to improve the high interaction rate trap. The latest version is lighter and cheaper and is being tested by early customers.

Kā mihi nui,
Shaun Ryan
2040 Limited

Audio bird monitoring is now available

A recent software update enabled you to optionally configure the DOC AI Cam as an audio bird monitor. This is available as a free upgrade and provides an easy way for you to do outcome monitoring for your project.

This takes one minute recordings at random times of the day at a rate of 32 recordings/day. The recordings are uploaded to the Cacophony Portal where they are analysed and the birds are automatically identified. A "Cacophony Index" is also calculated. This is a measure of the amount of bird song.

You can listen to the recordings, verify the automatic classifications and add your own. This will help improve the accuracy of the classifications and expand the number of birds that are recognised. You can also export the data to a spreadsheet to track trends over time.

This blog post details the how to configure the audio bird monitoring on the DOC AI Cam.

Other helpful resources:

• A list of the birds automatically identified by the DOC AI Cam.
• The product page for the audio bird monitoring functionality on the DOC AI Cam
• The manual for the audio bird monitoring functionality on the DOC AI Cam.

DOC AI Cam improvements

We have released a number of hardware and software improvements to the DOC AI Cam since our last newsletter. These significantly improve the reliability, capability, and ease of manufacture.

Hardware improvements include:

• A new case: This is manufactured using vacuum casting, significantly speeds up the manufacturing process, and should improve the waterproofness.
• A new seal: A number of early customers had issues with water damaging the camera. To address this we developed a new seal and sent this to all the existing customers.
• A new SIM card holder: The first version of our SIM card holder was difficult to remove the SIM from and easy to damage. The new version has a nice spring mechanism.

Software improvements include:

• Low power mode: You can now put the camera into low power mode (using Sidekick app or the Cacophony Portal). In this mode the camera will upload the recordings once/day. In high power mode the recordings are uploaded as they are made. Low power mode uses about 1/5 of the power and so a battery can last up to 2 months. This will vary according to the time of year and other factors. We have fixed a number of bugs with the low power mode and it now seems to be working reliably.
• Expanded and improved email alerts: You can now get daily or weekly summaries of what the camera has seen. This is a very efficient way of reviewing your footage
• Battery logging: You can now see the battery voltage when you log into Sidekick and on the Cacophony Portal. This should help with battery management. We are also logging temperature and humidity to give us a better understanding of the environments the cameras are operating in.
• Remotely changing settings: For connected cameras, we've added the ability to change the power mode and recording window remotely using the Cacophony Portal.
• Sidekick updates: We've made it easier to connect the camera to the companion Sidekick phone app by adding a setup wizard and help in the app. We're working on further improvements. It is surprisingly difficult to make an easy to use product that works on a broad range of phones. We've also added the ability to set an APN for your SIM cards.

We've uploaded examples of thermal videos of the different animals we automatically identify.

What's next

• AI on the camera: We're currently testing the AI running on the camera. The first use of this will be to control a trap. For example, disable it when there are birds, or enable it when there is a cat.
• Integration with alternative communication networks such as Celium and FTP when there is no cell coverage. With the AI on the camera, this will allow it to communicate what animals have been detected.
• A solar power option that we can resell at a reasonable cost.
• And much more.

Trap update

We have a lower cost, lighter version of our high interaction rate trap. We have a small number of customers using this version. It has had some reliability issues which we believe we've ironed out. We are also testing another design change that will further simplify the trigger mechanism.

We will also be integrating the DOC AI Cam with this trap so we can chose to disable the trap when no target species are present.

This trap is designed for the last, hard to catch predators that are often running past all your other traps and bait stations.