People who dwell in areas of the world the place megafauna, resembling lions and rhinoceroses, are both extinct or solely very hardly ever encountered don’t totally grasp the issues that every one too ceaselessly happen when these animals cross paths with people. A child elephant enjoying with its mom could also be an cute sight, however when these creatures enterprise right into a rural village or onto farmland, they’ll destroy properties and crops, and even kill individuals. Understandably, the people residing in these locations take motion to guard themselves, which generally means utilizing deadly power.
That is an unlucky scenario throughout, however as urbanization kicks into excessive gear and people and elephants are thrust into extra encounters, these issues are solely anticipated to speed up. Higher options that may defend each people and elephants are sorely wanted. Engineers Shebin Jacob and Nekhil R imagine that the important thing to fixing this drawback entails monitoring the areas of drawback animals in order that interventions can occur earlier than harmful human interactions have an opportunity to happen.
The {hardware} contained in the system (📷: Shebin Jacob, Nekhil R)
Towards this purpose, the crew has developed a prototype system for real-time elephant monitoring and geofencing. It was constructed with low-cost parts which can be sensible to be used the place wi-fi connectivity is proscribed. By utilizing GPS trackers which can be affixed to elephants, the system regularly tracks their areas. Once they enterprise exterior of predefined boundaries, the system will ship an SMS alert to inform park rangers or different people of their exercise. This info permits them to drive the animals again to a safer location lengthy earlier than dangerous human-elephant interactions can happen.
The {hardware} is constructed round a Particle B524 SoM, which is a mobile IoT module that was designed for distant monitoring purposes. This module is linked to an M.2 Analysis Board, which makes it simple to develop IoT purposes with its onboard nRF52840 microcontroller, and likewise add further parts like an antenna. An RYS352A GPS module makes it attainable to gather high-accuracy location info, and an 1,800mAh LiPo battery retains the whole lot working when daylight is unavailable to the 6-volt photo voltaic panels. All the parts had been fitted right into a customized 3D-printed enclosure to guard them from the weather.
The net software, exhibiting an elephant and a geofence (📷: Shebin Jacob, Nekhil R)
Firmware for the system was developed utilizing Particle Workbench. This software program makes use of the GPS module to find out the system’s exact location, then shops the coordinates in a Firebase Realtime Database. A dwell monitoring web site was constructed with OpenStreetMap to permit people to maintain their eyes on the elephants at any time. And when an animal leaves the geofenced space that’s thought-about to be a secure zone, Twilio is leveraged to ship an SMS alert.
The system developed by Shebin Jacob and Nekhil R has the potential to guard human and animal life, and likewise stop property losses, which makes this cheap and simple-to-build system very fascinating in areas the place individuals and elephants coexist. For that matter, it may simply be tailored to work with nearly any animal that must be intently monitored. If that’s one thing of curiosity to you, make sure you take a look at the challenge write-up. There are many particulars that may make it easier to in getting your individual resolution off the bottom rapidly.
