2040 Newsletter

Manufacturing partner for The Cacophony Project

Kia ora & Happy New Year,

This month we've added more functionality to the DOC AI Camera: the ability to mask out a proportion of the image to reduce false positives and we now recognise kōkako, bittern and dotterel calls. We have new data plans, a case study from Hanmer and updates on the solar battery pack and trap.

The Hanmer Springs Trapping Group is a great case study of how a small group can benefit from just one DOC AI Cam. They have been able to get a better understanding of the pests and birds and engage the community. After the trial they were able to purchase the camera (with the cost of the rental taken off). Check out the pig videos.

Kā mihi nui,
Shaun Ryan
2040 Limited, manufacturing partner for The Cacophony Project.

This is one of those "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" moments. Kiwi on Rakiura.

Check out the Hanmer Springs Case study, including videos of pigs in Hanmer.

DOC AI Cam

Masking

Sometimes when you set up a thermal camera part of the image has regular movement that isn't an animal. Examples include trees against the cold sky, or water. This can create a lot of extra footage. The machine vision does a pretty good job at identifying this as false triggers, saving you from too much work. But it does make mistakes and can mean the camera uses a lot more data than it would otherwise. We recently described a new feature that allows you to mask off a portion of the image from triggering recording.

More bird recognised

We now recognise kōkako, bittern and dotterel calls. Please let us know if there are any other birds you would like the camera to recognise. Here's a complete list of the birds currently recognised by the DOC AI Cam. We've also updated our analysis of Birdsong in Akaroa to include the data up to 2025

New data plans

We have introduced some new data plans that are pretty competitive for those who would like to use Spark. Please contact us if you're interested in using these for your camera. We created tips for those of you that are looking to reduce the data your camera uses.

Our solar battery pack

We continue to iterate and test the new solar battery pack. We've done another revision of the PCB and are adding new features. One feature allows the pack to recover if it runs flat, it will wait until it has reached a certain level of charge before it provides power. Otherwise it could get in a state where it never charges a flat battery because the camera would draw power as soon as there was a little bit of charge. We're expecting these to be available in the next month or so. We already have a reasonable amount of demand.

Reliability improvements

We released a small update last month that increases the reliability of the cameras, particularly the communications reliability. Make sure your camera is up to date to benefit from this.

Securing your camera

A number of people we have spoken to have expressed concerns about the camera being stolen or vandalised. As a result we have written some tips on how to secure your DOC AI Cam. Let us know if you have any other ideas.

An example of the kōkako call that is now recognised by the DOC AI Cam

High Interaction Rate Trap

We're pleased to announce that The Cacophony Project has received funding from the DOC Tools to Market fund to continue developing the High Interaction Rate Trap. We'll share more information about this next month. We have released a product page for the new design and a video showing how to put it together (apologies for the sound)

The engineers at Cacophony have come up with a new electromagnetic latch. This reduces the latency between when an animal is detected and the blinds release. The previous mechanism involved a small rotation of a motor which took about 250ms. This will be instant with no sound before the blinds release. It also simplifies the mechanism and make it more robust.