Kia ora,

We have exciting updates to share with you in this newsletter. The biggest news is that the Department of Conservation (DOC) are funding The Cacophony Project to develop a low cost, low power version of the thermal camera. They are also funding the expansion of our monitoring platform to include trail camera footage.

We have significantly improved our bird monitoring platform, including the ability to recognise many more birds and we have started work on a new version of the bird monitor hardware.

We've had reports from a customer of our High Interaction Rate Traps having great success at catching cats. We hope to share more details of this and updates on our trap development in our next newsletter. It's great to see other innovators making progress in this space: Critter Solutions are doing field trials of their AI trap and NZ AutoTraps are having great success knocking down possums across the motu.

Finally, check out the case study we published about the reWild Wainui project and how they are using our thermal cameras and bird monitors to achieve their goals.

 Kā mihi nui,
Shaun Ryan
2040 Limited.

New thermal camera coming 

Low cost, low power, with more features

Exciting news: DOC has funded a new version of our thermal camera. At just $1300 ex GST this is priced at less than half the original cost of old thermal camera. The Cacophony Project have been able to achieve this by carefully engineering the camera to reduce the labour required to manufacture it and by replacing some of the more expensive components. 

While doing this they have also been able to significantly reduce the power usage  and increase the functionality. We are aiming to use less than one third of the power of the existing cameras, significantly expanding battery life. It will also have a more appealing form factor, built-in GPS, better mounting options, lower cost & more robust battery, built in speaker/communications port, a microphone and a multi-coloured status light. 

These cameras are being field tested now and are available for pre-order. I am hoping to start manufacturing the first run of these cameras next month (beware I suffer from extreme optimism). The first of these have already sold. Get in quick to avoid delays. We are still developing the low power capability, and plan to make that available via a software update. 

We will offer an upgrade deal for customers that have bought the older cameras.

Sidekick, the companion app for the thermal cameras  (available on iOS and Android) has been updated to include an improved way of connecting to the camera and new functionality that prompts you to update the location and take a photo.

Bird monitor recognizes 22 birds/sounds

New bird monitor coming soon.

We can now automatically recognise 22 birds/sounds: bellbird, black noddy, blackbird, crimson rosella, fantail, frog, grey warbler, house sparrow, insect, generic noise, Norfolk gerygone, Norfolk robin, rifleman, rooster, silvereye, sooty tern, sparrow, white tern, human, kiwi, morepork, whistler and generic bird calls. We are still assessing the quality of our recognition algorithms. There is some more detail here about the new bird recognition capabilities.

Many thanks to the people that have been tagging bird calls that have made this possible. We now have over 35,000 tags.

Recordings with human voices detected are now (optionally) automatically deleted. This is to address any privacy concerns about the monitors inadvertently recording conversations.

There have also been various improvements to the interface for listening to and tagging bird calls. We are continuing to work on this. Read the details about the improvements to the bird monitor

We have stopped selling the existing bird monitor because we are unable to source the low cost Android phones it uses. We are working a new version that will be cheaper, lower power, and more robust. In the meantime there other bird monitors available, including the open-source audio moth and bugg recorders. DOC are also manufacturing their AR4 recorder again after struggling to get parts during COVID.  The main difference between our bird monitor and these is it will include connectivity, solar, and seamless integration into our ever expanding bird recognition algorithms.  

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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.