A few months ago I fly a mission with a Tau 2 640 infra red camera. All the info is here. The first trial prove that the equipment can indeed operate in night condition and we learn how to take off and land in that condition. Unfortunately during the first few flight we did not capture clear video that show the existent of our target, the small size marque monkey. This is mainly due to the inconsistent radio collar signal we received ,so we may have plan the wrong flight path.
This time, with a more organised planning, sufficient ground survey to confirm the movement of the two monkey that fitted with radio collar, we know where our target was and plan the flight accordingly. With the same set up and same flight altitude, this time we do successfully record them which show up as bright white spot in the video.
Flying at 100 meter, the monkey only show up as a few pixel through the camera sensor. So we are not hoping to see the animal outline through the video. As there are no bigger size animal stay on top of tree at that area, those white spots found around the tree area are pretty much confirm that is the marque monkey. More detail analysis will require to make accurate survey but we have demonstrate that it is viable with our low cost UAV.
I post this video for those who may be interest to use this camera for their research work as a video out put reference.
Comments
@Guy McCaldin
hi, guy, did you share the drafts or sell the ball and have some more details ?
i search such a solution for a optris 400
thank you !
regards sascha
Very very nice, and compact too! Funny, we're also using a 320 in an 85mm ball but with only one brushless axis (tilt), the other is a 210° rotation servo, not ideal but really light, our weight is about 210g. Also no concurrent EO but hot swappable with an EO if needed.
+1 on the gimbal, Guy, looks great, own design?
Ha that's sort of exactly what I am doing to get closer to our UHF data collars. Some of those have legacy VHF pingers, the ones that transmit every 20ms and I am using an SDR to record signal strength vs position of the receiver and from there map the result. Then once deciphered I can fly to a more likely spot for the UHF collar and loiter to capture data. As you will well know finding collars in hilly terrain and dense undergrowth can be a mission and can easily waste a day with poor results. I was trying to fit the software onto a Pi but I don't think its upto it really. As I say its week one of playing we have not made tuned antennas or tied anything up electrically on my laptop to make it quieter. On the image below you can see an entire Mhz worth of data. I can pick out the individual collars if I want. My friend hid four and you can see the spots. Dark red more likely to be a collar. The large blob of red at the top is some railway signalling (we think) that we had no idea was there.
Our newer collars do all sorts of fancy things that will make this sort of thing outdated. We keep getting asked to find other peoples collars that have been lost and as you say the SDR allows to look for lots of brands.
For those that have no idea what we are talking about here's a man with a pipe so he must know.
You need to go a little way into the video to see the gear.
Are the collars VHF pinging ones Keeyan and Graham?? Currently working on a better way of locating them without a yagi. Just driving around with a laptop and receiver mapping hotspots it works pretty well only one week into the trial and I need to smarten it up a little. Next step is to shrink it and get it airborne. Then fly the reserve and go back and fly listening out for our UHF data collars in a much more likely area. Its certainly not as easy as all the kickstarter crowd believe. Advocates of RFID tags must be smoking their socks ;-)
IR in forest is very difficult, we sometimes can't see elephants under thick canopy, so it's good work finding a marque monkey! A camera that could point at the collar signal could be useful.
1st prize though is full HD IR that doesn't cost the price of a car!
Hi Keeyen,
Great accomplishment,
It might help if you could possibly mark suspected monkeys perhaps with arrow or circle.
Seemed like around 4 min 30 seconds and later around 7 minutes.
What it also very much makes clear is that use of IR camera is not as straight forward as a lot of us have previously thought.
Best Regards,
Gary