Kia ora and welcome to spring and our September newsletter.

This month we've introduced more features for the DOC AI Cam, including Celium integration, support for more battery types and some important bug fixes. We haven't made any progress with the trap this month, with a key engineer cycling around Nepal.

After increasing the number of birds identified by the camera, we are starting to see some cool examples: a kiwi in Northland and a kāka in Glenfern sanctuary on Great Barrier. These calls were correctly identified by the AI.

On the thermal video we've seen some firsts: a bittern in the Coromandel and a Bandicoot in NSW. We don't recognise these yet - they were tagged by people.

This month a couple of customers have shared stories about how they're using our cameras:

• Northland Regional Council are using our cameras to monitor pests and birds. They appreciate the low effort required to get high quality monitoring with instantaneous data from the connected cameras. They saw possum detections drop to zero after a 1080 drop earlier this year. They're hoping to get audio confirmation of a tītipounamu that was spotted recently.
• The Orkney Native Wildlife Project is using our cameras to detect stoats. They're finding them effective at 20-30m and able to spot movement at 50m. See an example below of a stoat they detected that was missed by a trail camera next to it. It's a stoatally different experience.

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

A kākā automatically identified at Glenfern Sanctuary, Great Barrier Island.

A kiwi call automatically identified in Northland.

This is a video of a stoat captured by a DOC AI Cam on Orkney Islands. A trail camera next to it failed to trigger.

DOC AI Cam

Celium integration

A software update for the DOC AI Cam included integration with the Celium network, support for more battery types and lots of bug fixes.

The Celium integration allows the camera to send out what it has seen across the low bandwidth network. The team at Encounter are testing this with some early customers.

Bug fixes

This update removed a bug that caused lots of 10 minute recordings to be made in low power mode. There was also a problem connecting to WiFi on some Android phones that appears to have been fixed.

We released a follow up bug fix last week after noticing some recordings being missed. The cameras are behaving reliably now.

We've also sped up some of the pages on the Cacophony portal, particularly for those projects with lots of cameras.

We recommend making sure your cameras are up to date.

Manufacturing update

We caught up with our orders briefly last week, but now have a small backlog. We expect to be caught up shortly so any new camera orders can be sent promptly.

Upcoming improvements

Next month we are working on the Cacophony Portal, adding some new features and working to make the new version the default. We also plan to improve our thermal recognition rates significantly.

Our solar solution

We've been designing the new solar charging circuit for our 12V battery pack. We have completed the first iteration of this and have ordered some PCBs. We expect them to arrive soon, so we can start field testing.

We’re still not sure when this will be ready to sell.

This short video shows you how you can pin a button on the Cacophony Portal to make it easier to tag your favourite animals