Kia ora,

I hope you are keeping warm as winter sets in. Personally, I am debating about when I need to start wearing shoes rather than jandals when I bike into work on the brisk Ōtautahi mornings.

We have some exciting updates to share with you in this newsletter, across all of our product range, including:

Thermal cameras

• we're having a camera sale
• various software improvements to the thermal cameras
• a very cool potential project to help the Hoiho penguins

Bird monitors

• further improvements to the bird tagging, including the ability for you to easily find recordings that have been automatically labelled and a video demonstrating the new functionality.
• A  description of the deployment of the bird monitors at the beautiful Lake Hāwea Station.
• A trans -Tasman tagging challenge.

Traps

• Another deployment of 10 traps, this time with Predator Free Banks Peninsula 
• A test of the trap using an AI trigger.

Hazing

Our lowest tech product is finally in stock and available now. Our hessian hazing is an easy way to improve the effectiveness of your traps.

Ngā mihi nui,

Shaun Ryan

2040 Limited.

Thermal camera updates

Sale, improvements and innovation

We're having a sale while stocks last. We've taken $1000 off the price of our thermal cameras and combo packages. Our cheapest camera is now only $1899. The general trend in technology is products tend to get cheaper and more capable over time. The features of our camera have improved as we have rolled out software updates. We hope this is the start of a series of price reductions over the coming years.

On topic of improvements, we have rolled out a number in recent months:

• You can now pin a button - which makes that tagging more efficient when the animals you're looking at aren't one of the main buttons.
• Recognising that thermal cameras get moved around, we've assigned a name to each location (which we call a station). At the moment you can only change the name of the station, but we will soon add other features, such as being able to upload a photo of the location. This should make interpreting the thermal videos a little easier.
• We've made the Wi-Fi easier to set up.

We've also updated the manual to include

• a description of the stopped devices email that you may receive from time to time.
• What to do if you don't have the right permissions to download videos from a camera.

Cool innovation

One innovative project we are looking at doing is to have our camera automatically open a door in a predator proof fence in Stewart Island/Rakiura if a penguin comes along. This will be to enable Hoiho penguins that are nesting inside the fence to access the water. We are able to do this because the camera can now run the machine vision algorithms on the camera and know what it is looking at in real time.

Please let us know if you've got some interesting way you'd like to use our cameras.  

Bird monitor updates

Bird tagging, Lake Hāwea Station and a trans-Tasman challenge

We've continued to make further improvements to our bird tagging software, including adding the ability to zoom in on the spectrum, change the colours, male/female and adult/juvenile attributes, more bird variants and non bird sounds, along with a host of bug fixes. This is very cool and easy to use.

If you are able to recognise bird calls, then I recommend tagging some of these recordings so we can use this data to build our automatic recognition algorithms. Our customer in Norfolk Islands has started tagging their recordings and we may be in a position where we have more tagged data for Australian than New Zealand. I'd like to throw down a trans Tasman challenge to see which country can do the best tagging for their birds.

We've also made it so you can search for recordings that are automatically tagged. This is also very cool. The algorithm does a pretty good job at finding those morepork calls.

I've created a video showing how to use all of these new bird tagging and search features to get started with your tagging. For those of you that prefer the written word, I have also updated the Bird Monitor manual

Finally, if you're interested, have a read of our account of installing Bird Monitors in the beautiful Lake Hāwea Station.

Trap update

The Cacophony team have continued to make progress on the AI powered trap. They are currently running an experiment where a thermal camera will broadcast via bluetooth any animals it recognises. The trap is configured to only activate if the camera has identified a possum. This is a proof of concept for an AI powered trap and is in an area where there are domestic cats. We hope to see footage of possums being caught and other animals not triggering the trap. A lot of other work is happening in the background.

We have also deployed 10 traps on the Kaitorete spit with Predator Free Banks Peninsula as part of a trial. We are manufacturing more traps, in part because of an order from the Cayman Islands where they will trial their ability to trap cats to protect the local iguana. Many of the issues we are facing here in Aotearoa are shared around the world. Our mission to become predator free by 2050 is pushing organisations like The Cacophony Project and others to develop technology that is world leading.

2040 on social media

2040 is on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn Follow us wherever you are to stay up to date.

Sign up to this newsletter

Have you been forwarded this newsletter?

Sign up here to receive this newsletter directly. We aim to send out one per month but often end up doing it less frequently because life gets in the way.

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.