BUGG

A robust design for the sensor of an autonomous ecosystem monitoring system. Devised by Dr Sarab Sethi at Imperial Collage London, to lower the cost and labour involved in acquiring field data. Installed in 10 research locations at SAFEproject in Malaysian Borneo, capturing audio and time-lapse weather vistas.

Raspberry Pi, GPRS, Non-Woven Membrane, UV Printing, CNC Polycarbonate.

The adaptable and tooling free design uses 8mm polycarbonate to interface all the functioning elements. The interface is UV printed to the front, then features are CNC cut to the rear, including the critical waterproofing details. The polycarbonate caseback is an off the shelf internationally available part with variants allowing for alternate equipment builds.

Ants would eat the foam windshield from early prototypes, degrading the audio captured. This was the first design detail to be tested, a 3d printed horn with a non-woven membrane material protecting the microphone was offered successfully to a Leafcutter ant colony at London Zoo, and proved over a week not to be to their taste.

Professional tree climbers, ascend to around 40m to carefully asses an early sensor pinned for replacement. With years passing finding the location in the new growth can be a challenge. While the devices are self-sufficient, care is taken that the straps do not damage the tree over time.

Tree mounted and solar powered, these sensors are self-sufficient. Uploading audio and image data for server side pattern analysis. The resulting data is rich insights, being a near live representation of audible events, such as primates passing or undesired human activity.

Running on Raspberry Pi, Dr Sarab Sethi’s platform is both modular and open source, the industrial design builds on this, allowing for modifications for additional or alternative sensor imputs, and unique apparatus to replace the standard rain guard, all possible from a remote Lab such as SAFEproject.

The open access website shows the potential for the technology : acoustics.safeproject.net

Dr Sarab Sethi’s paper in the British Ecological Society Journal : SAFE Acoustics: An open-source, real-time eco-acoustic monitoring network in the tropical rainforests of Borneo.

Dr Sarab Sethi

Imperial Collage London

SAFEProject, Staff and Climbing team