At CircuitHub we’re proud to have helped so many exciting projects come to fruition. Right now, we’re especially proud of AudioMoth - a full-spectrum open source audio logger that enables scientists, ecologists, and ecological researchers to better study wildlife and animal ecosystems.

AudioMoth, the first product of the Open Acoustics initiative, was designed by two computer science PhD students at the University of Southampton, Andrew Hill and Peter Prince, and Alex Rogers, a computer science professor at the University of Oxford. Together they developed a product that overcomes some of the obstacles of remotely monitoring biodiversity as well as significantly reduces the disruption of habitats previously seen when collecting such data.  

Around the size of a credit card, the AudioMoth is able to capture 384,000 audio samples per second. Each unit can be programmed to record the calls of specific target species while also serving as an alert system for sounds such as gunshots and chainsaws. The device is currently being used all over the world to detect illegal activities and to monitor and protect critically endangered species such as bats in the Madeira Islands of Portugal and forest birds in Mt. Kenya National Park.

In response to the numerous individuals wishing to acquire an AudioMoth, Alasdair Davies from the Arribada Initiative which aims to deliver cost-effective, open conservation technology for all, created a campaign through GroupGets. GroupGets hosts group purchases, facilitates payment processing and handles shipping. By teaming up with them the device was made affordable and widely accessible to conservationists. The cost of one unit purchased through GroupGets is approximately $50. This was key to enabling coverage across large landscapes, where multiple devices are required. Four product runs have been completed (with the fifth manufacturing round currently in progress).

Over 4,000 units of the AudioMoth have been built so far. The demand doesn’t seem to be slowing down and a new version of the board is in the works.

Thanks, Open Acoustics, GroupGets, and Aribada Initiative for letting us be part of your journey!

We recently sponsored Defconbots, an autonomous robots competition which is part of Defcon and took place in Las Vegas at the beginning of August. Defconbots had a five year hiatus, but is finally back. We were very excited when they asked us to become a sponsor of the event.  We helped to sponsor the competition by donating some CircuitHub shirts as well as a $250 credit towards manufacturing on CircuitHub.

Prize Table with some CircuitHub shirts

Defconbots was started started in 2004 at DEFCON12. The goal of the competition has always been to design, build, and program an autonomous robot to complete a specific task. For example, in 2004 the goal was to build a mobile robot that can pick up ping pong balls and transport them across an arena.

The objective this year was to have a robot autonomously track five moving targets and “fire” a specific  laser module at them. The targets, which consisted of ping-pong balls mounted to model train cars with sensors and LEDs inside, came in waves that were increasingly difficult. To win contestants had to build a robot and write software for the robot to last the longest and hit the most targets. It's like a real-life tower defense game. A reference design was provided to help the contestants get started.

The winner of the $250 credit went to Garrett Kendrick who earned the "Best Build Robot" award in addition to placing third overall in the competition.

Garrett explained on his own blog the process he went through to design his award winning robot:

I first started with a design similar to the reference robot using servos and a laser cut platform. I also used the Arduino and Processing code from Project Sentry Gun. I simply modified the Arduino code to handle a laser module instead of  an air-soft gun. I really liked the interface and the ability to lead the target, but the resolution (ability to move in small steps) wasn’t good enough. At ten feet away from the target, one step of the servo resulted in about 4 inches of movement of the laser dot.

I then laser cut some gears and some mounting hardware to try and increase the resolution.  While this did work, it resulted in a serious decrease in speed/responsiveness.

I then decided to purchase a RAMPS 1.4 board and some NEMA 17 stepper motors. I a quite familiar with this equipment and figured I could always make another 3D printer with the parts after the contest.

After quite a bit of experimentation, I determined that a direct-drive gimble was the way to go (the bracket of the tilt motor was mounted directly to the shaft of the pan motor and the laser/camera bracket was mounted directly to the tilt motor shaft).

After quite a bit of code writing and debugging, I got it working. I was amazed at the accuracy and responsiveness, but had to play with the code to get the robot to "lead” the target to compensate for image processing/motor movement delays.

Garrett and his "best build" robot

Congrats to Garrett on his win. We can't wait to see what cool thing he will manufacture on CircuitHub with his credit! We wished we could have attended the event in person this year, but there's always next year!

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.

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 :)

CircuitHub's mission is to take the frustration out of designing electronics.  That being said, we are always on the lookout for tools that can help do this. When we find something useful, we share it with our users.

Lightening is not collimated or polarized, but since the human eye withstanding is greater under these conditions, the data is a nice upper limit. 

The average lightning bolt lasts 30 microseconds. Therefore, the maximum safe irradiance from a lightning bolt is 035 * 30e-6 = 3e-7 J/cm^2

The cell phone sensor (let's use an iPhone1) has 2048 pixels in 0.358 cm:

The amount of the original almost billion Joules of electrical energy that reaches an individual pixel in your imager is 4.43e-12 Joules,optical/pixel. This is about 1/2.43e-19 times smaller!

Therefore you are below the human damage threshold by five orders of magnitude. Even if we assume the full electrical energy of the bolt was light you get 2.43e-10 Joules,optical/pixel, which is still three orders of magnitude too small.

Cell phone sensors can withstand greater intensity than the human eye without damage since they can handle internal temperatures in excess of 125C which the human eye can, obviously, not.

Cell phone sensors are also a lot less sensitive to light than the human retinal cells, furthering their withstanding ability. You can recalculate for being even closer to the lightning bolt and for farther away by recomputing with the equations above.

You can build an improved model to account for the lens and further justify some of these assumptions. If you want that level of detail you can find it here.

CircuitHub will be providing mentorship and technical support at the Y Combinator Hardware Hackathon, hosted by Upverter, along with Pebble, Octopart, Lockitron, Boosted Boards, and Double Robotics,.

After gathering into teams, participants will have twelve hours to transform their idea into a preliminary design.  At the end of the hackathon, the teams will present and be judged on the quality, applicability, completeness, and manufacturability of their design. 

Participate in the innovation, mingle with hardware hackers, and gain insight into CircuitHub as we help bring ideas to life.

You can apply as an individual or as a team. Registration is open until February 8. 

See you February 23 at the Y Combinator office in Mountain View, CA.