2040 Feb 2025 Newsletter: Transparent overlay photos and audio monitoring improvements.

2040 Newsletter

Manufacturing partner for The Cacophony Project

Kia ora,

We only sent two of these "monthly" newsletters last year. So you may be surprised to see this, barely a month since the last one. We've been busy.

Most of the updates this month are to do with the DOC AI Cam. We've made some software improvements to improve the audio monitoring and make it easier to understand thermal videos with overlay photos.

Our customers have been busy too: we have a video of a stoat chasing a bird in the Coromandel, a research report from Zealandia and a story from Predator Free NZ about Kerikeri Peninsular Conservation Trust.

We're still working on our trap, with a new, bigger spring and motor. We are planning on starting trials with the AI controlled trap shortly.

Next week I'm speaking at the Canterbury Branch of the NZ Biosecurity Institute, Mini Education Training Seminar, or METS. Please let us know if you're interested in having someone talk at your group about what we're up to at the Cacophony Project.

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

DOC AI Cam

We've made a handful of software updates this month. Probably this most dramatic is the ability to add a transparent overlay photo to the thermal video in the new version of the portal. This makes it significantly easier to understand a thermal video.

We've improved the processing of thermal videos to limit the number of tracks to 10. This simplifies the reviewing of videos that previously had many tracks.

We've also made improvements to the audio monitoring: allowing you to change the mode remotely, to use the Sidekick App to download recordings and added the ability to review the audio recordings on the new version of the portal.

We expect the next version of the software to support running the AI on the camera. This will allow integration with traps and low bandwidth networks.

We continue to add new waterproofing to old cameras. If you haven't sent yours in, please be sure to do so.

We almost got to the point where we had cameras in stock, but now have a small backlog that we're working to clear. We hope to be on top of this early next month and have stock on hand to send out immediately when we receive an order.

AI Chat bot

We have added an AI Chat bot to our website. This is trained on the contents of our website and seems to do a pretty good job at answering questions about our products, whether you're considering buying, or have a support question.

While a chatbot is not always as good as an informed human, it has the advantage of giving answers immediately and being available all the time. Sometimes it's better than this human. Last week a customer asked if our batteries had short circuit protection. I wasn't 100% sure. The chat bot said they did and this was based off the manual (which I had written, but it was outside my memory capacity).

If you have any questions about our products please give it a go. It pops up at the bottom right of the website, but we are always here to answer email or phone calls if needed.

High Interaction Rate Trap

It's been a slow month for the development of our trap as we've been waiting for a new spring to arrive to work with our new, simplified design. This has finally arrived and is looking good.

Unfortunately we needed a bigger motor. We were able to source one quickly thanks to Kev from NZ Autotraps. He sent down one of theirs and shared his supplier details. Many thanks to Kev. It's great to see companies in this space collaborating. We hope to see more of this.

Now we've got this sorted, we are modifying the design to incorporate the larger motor and then we will be ready to start testing the trap again.