Spark have been a fantastic supporter of The Cacophony project.

The NEXT Foundation and ZIP have recently invested in the Cacophony Project and this will enable us accelerate our development plans.

The latest innovation we are testing is a camera that can rotate around, up and down to follow predators. There are two main benefits of using this. First, we can see much more than with a static camera. The second, main long-term reason is that this will allow us to implement a kill mechanism that will not require the predator to enter a trap.

A few observations from our experiments with live capture traps. As noted in our previous blog post, they seem to work better than other traps we have tried. We know they are not the long-term solution, but we need some devices that are more guaranteed to take out predators while we trial different audio lures. We don't want predators to learn and ignore audio lures that we test.

Some traps seem 10 times more effective than others (and other interesting things we have learned from our new camera tool)
The main purpose of our camera and trapping over the last four weeks has been to test the new camera set up and get as many videos of predators as possible. We can then tag them in a way that artificial intelligence can learn the difference between predator species.

We have made some improvements to the video capture tool we have been developing to make it better able to identify all predators in the New Zealand environment. We have been testing our device next to a standard commercial trail camera. These are typically designed for hunting deer and pigs etc, so they are not tuned for smaller mammals (unless up very close). The device we are using has the following advantages that are described in more detail below:

We are very happy to announce that the Next Foundation and Zero Invasive Predators have made a significant contribution that will enable us to accelerate the development of tools for recognising, luring and eliminating predators.

I once heard that when you think an IT project is 99% done, you are probably half way there. A lot of work has been done on the Cacophonometer over the last few months and it is now ready for you to try it out.

The short video below was presented at TEDx is a summary of the Cacophony Project. Feel free to share with anyone you think may be interested and sign up to our newsletter to hear about the latest developments (see bottom of page for email sign up).

My name is Tim Hunt and I am a lecturer in Information Technology at Waikato Institute of Technology (Wintec) in Hamilton, New Zealand. I first heard about The Cacophony Project, and the work that Grant Ryan and others are doing, at this year's ITx conference in Wellington. Grant's presentation outlined the 'big picture' aims of the project - to return New Zealand's bird life to its former glory, by using technology to help eradicate the pests responsible for killing so many birds.

A team is looking to set up a company to sell and distribute devices and services that use the research The Cacophony Project has been working on. The device records background bird song every hour for a few minutes and then uploads the data to the cloud.

The Open Source design of this project is working remarkably well with an increasing number of clever folks starting to contribute to the project.

The Cacophony Project is not a science project in the same way it is not a business project. However there are lots of ways the tools created by our project will be able to be used by scientists. Below are a few examples that we think are particularly interesting.

The Cacophony Project is completely open source. The hard/software component can be used gratuitously in accordance with their licenses. Given this, how can you possibly create a business from it? The short answer is the same way people build businesses selling water.

The device we have created to test has two cameras running on a Raspberry Pi. The reason for two cameras is that we want to know the relative performance of:

Infra-red (IR) cameras that require an IR light to turn on to capture video.

Heat cameras that do not need any additional light but just measures background heat (this is thought to be more sensitive but is a lower resolution).

Just a quick shout out to Spark. Some folks at Spark heard about our project and immediately offered to help. From the first meeting we walked out with some sim cards with free data to play around with.

There are numerous ways to go about improving predator elimination from an engineering point of view. The two extremes are:

1. Use the minimum technology possible to improve what we have now. There is lots of room for improvement!

2. Try to create the ultimate device and then try to make it cheaper.