Kia ora,

Welcome to the increasingly inaccurately named 2040 Monthly Newsletter.

First of all a big thank you to all of those that are helping in the fight against COVID. Whether you are part of a lock down, or simply are wearing a mask, have a vaccination and are signing in, thank you.

Here at 2040 we have a couple of new products to announce - a battery meter and a cable that lets you use a car battery for the thermal camera. We have some small product improvements and a trap update, including some pictures of DOC deploying our traps to try to protect bitterns in Canterbury.

Finally, congratulations to the pekapeka-tou-roa for its recent victory. It sounds like a tall story - but it's probably a long tail. Maybe next year we can get a flying fish to win to continue expanding the diversity of the bird of the year competition.

Ngā mihi nui,

Shaun Ryan

2040 Limited.

Battery meter

Take charge of your batteries

We've release a battery meter for our refurbished Lime batteries (used for the thermal camera and the trap). This is really useful if you have lots of batteries and tend to forget exactly which ones are charged or not. You simply plug it in and you see the level of charge and the voltage.

Car battery adapter

More options for how you power your thermal camera.

This is a very simple product that lets you power the camera by a lead acid battery. This was originally developed for the Pacific Islands where we were having trouble shipping refurbished lithium ion batteries. We decided to make the cable available to anyone because it gives a few more options and may save some costs, although lead acid batteries are heavier.  One possibility is to use this with a 12V solar system for a permanent camera installation. We intend to experiment with this over the coming months.

Sidekick update

Reliability improvements

The sidekick app is used to set up our thermal cameras and to pull recordings off the cameras. We have released an updated version (v2.2.3) with significant reliability improvements. This should have updated automatically for you already.

See the release notes on our blog

Thumbnails in email alerts

Save time viewing videos

One of the beta features of our thermal cameras lets you receive an email when the camera detects certain predators. We've added a thumbnail image taken from the video into the email. This lets you see at a glance whether the machine vision got the classification right and you can then decide to click and watch the video. We expect to be using these thumbnails in search results and elsewhere on the Cacophony portal.

Please contact us if you'd like to receive these email alerts.

Trap update

We recently completed a small manufacturing run of 22 traps. 20 of these have already been committed to projects and we have a couple in stock (available for purchase, or to rent). DOC have deployed the first 10 at Te Waihora to help protect the endangered bittern. They have had our thermal cameras deployed for the past few months to assess the population and variety of predators in the area so we can measure the impact of the traps .

In other trap news from The Cacophony Project

• Predator Free 2050 released a video about the projects they've been supporting, including the trap
• There is growing evidence of low interaction rate both for traditional traps and tree mounted traps
• Cacophony engineers have been working on a lighter, smaller, cheaper mechanism for raising the blinds on the traps. This is currently being tested and refined. Check out this video.
• The Cacophony Project are also working on an auto-kill mechanism. This will include automatically identifying the predator in the trap and physical mechanism to dispatch the predator. Watch this space.

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2040 Ltd is a social enterprise whose mission is to eradicate predators from NZ by manufacturing and selling open source technology developed by The Cacophony Project.