Tag Archives: conservation

Ultrasonically detect bats with Raspberry Pi

Post Syndicated from Ashley Whittaker original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/ultrasonically-detect-bats-with-raspberry-pi/

Welcome to October, the month in which spiderwebs become decor and anything vaguely gruesome is considered ‘seasonal’. Such as bats. Bats are in fact cute, furry creatures, but as they are part of the ‘Halloweeny animal’ canon, I have a perfect excuse to sing their praises.

baby bats in a row wrapped up like human babies
SEE? Baby bats wrapped up cute like baby humans

Tegwyn Twmffat was tasked with doing a bat survey on a derelict building, and they took to DesignSpark to share their Raspberry Pi–powered solution.

UK law protects nesting birds and roosting bats, so before you go knocking buildings down, you need a professional to check that no critters will be harmed in the process.

The acoustic signature of an echo-locating brown long-eared bat

The problem with bats, compared to birds, is they are much harder to spot and have a tendency to hang out in tiny wall cavities. Enter this big ultrasonic microphone.

Raspberry Pi 4 Model B provided the RAM needed for this build

After the building was declared safely empty of bats, Tegwyn decided to keep hold of the expensive microphone (the metal tube in the image above) and have a crack at developing their own auto-classification system to detect which type of bats are about.

How does it work?

The ultrasonic mic picks up the audio data using an STM M0 processor and streams it to Raspberry Pi via USB. Raspberry Pi runs Alsa driver software and uses the bash language to receive the data.

Tegwyn turned to the open-source GTK software to process the audio data

It turns out there are no publicly available audio records of bats, so Tegwyn took to their own back garden and found 6 species to record. And with the help of a few other bat enthusiasts, they cobbled together an audio dataset of 9 of the 17 bat species found in the UK!

More baby bats

Tegwyn’s original post about their project features a 12-step walkthrough, as well as all the code and commands you’ll need to build your own system. And here’s the GitHub repository, where you can check for updates.

The post Ultrasonically detect bats with Raspberry Pi appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Raspberry Pi listening posts ‘hear’ the Borneo rainforest

Post Syndicated from Ashley Whittaker original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-listening-posts-hear-the-borneo-rainforest/

These award-winning, solar-powered audio recorders, built on Raspberry Pi, have been installed in the Borneo rainforest so researchers can listen to the local ecosystem 24/7. The health of a forest ecosystem can often be gaged according to how much noise it creates, as this signals how many species are around.

And you can listen to the rainforest too! The SAFE Acoustics website, funded by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), streams audio from recorders placed around a region of the Bornean rainforest in Southeast Asia. Visitors can listen to live audio or skip back through the day’s recording, for example to listen to the dawn chorus.

Listen in on the Imperial College podcast

What’s inside?

We borrowed this image of the flux tower from Sarab Sethi’s site

The device records data in the field and uploads it to a central server continuously and robustly over long time-periods. And it was built for around $305.

Here’s all the code for the platform, on GitHub.

The 12V-to-5V micro USB converter to the power socket of the Anker USB hub, which is connected to Raspberry Pi.

The Imperial College London team behind the project has provided really good step-by-step photo instructions for anyone interested in the fine details.

Here’s the full set up in the field. The Raspberry Pi-powered brains of the kit are safely inside the green box

The recorders have been installed by Imperial College London researchers as part of the SAFE Project – one of the largest ecological experiments in the world.

Screenshot of the SAFE Project website

Dr Sarab Sethi designed the audio recorders with Dr Lorenzo Picinali. They wanted to quantify the changes in rainforest soundscape as land use changes, for example when forests are logged. Sarab is currently working on algorithms to analyse the gathered data with Dr Nick Jones from the Department of Mathematics.

The lovely cross-disciplinary research team based at Imperial College London

Let the creators of the project tell you more on the Imperial College London website.

The post Raspberry Pi listening posts ‘hear’ the Borneo rainforest appeared first on Raspberry Pi.