Project Spotlight: Wildlife Tracking Tags

9/02/2014 0 Comments

We wanted to start highlighting some of the great projects that have been manufactured using CircuitHub. We're constantly impressed by the different projects people have been uploading onto CircuitHub whether it be for research, business or just hobby purposes and want to show off all the cool things that CircuitHub users are creating.



A recent project that we manufactured were these lightweight low-cost wildlife tracking tags using integrated transceivers. The tags were designed by Sivan Toledo for use by the Minerva Center for Movement Ecology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a center that focuses on measuring and understanding the movement patterns of wild animals.

Common kestrel with tracking tag attached

A tag with a tantalum reservoir capacitor
and a tabbed CR2032 lithium cell.

The tags have a sophisticated integrated RF transceiver and a microcontroller which allows them to be used in many different ways: they can be used as simple unmodulated pingers, as coded pingers, or as RF proximity detectors.

Designed to be very lightweight, the tags with battery attached weigh less than 2g enabling them to be used on wildlife 40g and up. They have already been successfully deployed on various different wildlife including the Barn Owl, Common Kestrel, Spur-winged Plover and Coypu.

The hardware files for the tags are available on CircuitHub under the Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license. New, improved version of the tags have already been uploaded onto CircuitHub and are currently being manufactured. You can read more about the tags here or read the original paper here.

If you have a project that you've manufactured with CircuitHub and you'd like to be featured on our blog, please feel free to reach out :)

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