Hi!
So there are tradeoffs between battery capacity and memory card space vs. recording length and recording quality. To have the most suitable settings for different periods of the day, I was wondering whether it would be possible to have different settings (sample rate, gain, sleep duration, recording duration) for each recording period to optimise battery and storage use while collecting information on different sound sources.
What I would want is one recording period for birds in the morning, a second, low frequency one during the day for anthropogenic sounds and a short very high frequency period in the evening for bats.
Is it possible to do that using the configuration app? Or is it something you are planning to implement for the next software release?
Thank you very much for your amazing work!
While sampling frequency is the number one setting to change with the functionality of having recording-period specific settings, the topic is not limited to this setting and @dominic.martin rightly stresses that point. It would be very useful to be able to have specific recording periods follow specific dates, duty cycles, recording dates, etc. so we can address taxon-specific phenology questions comprehensively. At present the Audiomoth is limited in that respect compared to other "competing" products, but this kind of investment could be easily scaled-up by firmware update with a one-time development dost. Note also that one of the main advantages of the Audiomoth - to be very energy-efficient - is currently held back by this limitation, as we consistently apply conservative global settings (that are more energy- and data-consuming) to our deployments to avoid losing what we want to keep only at certain times, even though we then discard a large proportion of the unused data.
I agree the ability to modify recording parameters for bats/birds during the night/day would possibly the most useful feature for long-term monitoring purposes. It would potentially offer the biggest leap in managing battery/memory for continuous deployment, other than installing external batteries/memory systems.
Seems this thread has been running for a long time, but I would just add I too would really like to be able to specify settings for both birds and bats rather than leave two AudioMoths in the same location which is a bigger limitation on survey design.
Thanks
I second all of that. We're about to deploy non-AudioMoth units in Cuba and the Dominican Republic in an incredibly remote area with limited access (military-controlled lands in the case of Cuba where our collaborators can't just come and go). Even though sunrise time doesn't change much at those latitudes, it changes enough so that we decided we couldn't use our AudioMoths for this project. For our case, we'd like the ability to record 30-minutes pre-sunrise to 30-minutes post sunrise every day.
Other nice addition to the software would be an option to schedule a recording period based on local sunrise and sunset time! Birds are most active on the first few hours after sunrise and a few hours before sunset. To achieve that it requires to update field configuration a few times in the season.
One quite simple way would be to manually specify a few (3-5) sunrise/sunset dates in Configuration app, so the app can calculate when to start (shift) each day’s recording. For example, Apr 01 – local Sunrise 06:51, local Sunset 20:03 and May 01 – Sunrise 05:34, Sunset 21:07. It’s 30 days apart and Sunrise became 1 hour and 17 minutes earlier, but Sunset - 1 hour and 4 minutes later. So every day till May 01 morning recordings will start (shift) 2 minutes and 34 seconds earlier, but each Evening recording will start 2 minutes and 8 seconds later.
‘Morning’ shift could affect all recordings in a period from 3 AM to 3 PM, but ‘Evening’ shift from 3 PM to 3 AM.
Has this suggested option of specific settings for different periods been implemented (I'm behind firmware upgrades because of https://www.openacousticdevices.info/support/device-support/audiomoth-1-0-0-not-recognized-with-firmware-1-4-4) ?
If not, is this option being considered for forthcoming versions of the apps? It would be so useful.
@Alex Rogers It would be great if this option would be available on the AudioMoth configuration App. I'm sure many people are interested in this to record birds and bats with different settings (sample rate, gain, sleep and recording duration). Most of us however have no coding experience (me included). Would you please please add an option of defining the settings of each recording period in the app?
I would also love this as an option. Is this something that is on the cards as a possibility for a software update?
I too think that this would be a great addition. I would even further it by suggesting that you are able to configure a greater than 24hr cycle, so that you could for example record bats one night and owls the next on a 2-nightly rotation.
I too would think it would be great idea to have a option to download as you descibe rather than hardwire. I cannot code either so it would be fantastic if someone could do it for the rest of us.
I also think that being able to have different settings for different recording periods would be very good. As far as I understand, Alex suggests doing it at firmware level, which I believe would be cumbersome for most people and prone to errors. Much better if this were an option in the software, so that you could set an specific sleep and recording duration for each recording period. Could you consider this for a future version of the software?
I am just trying out my audio moth and the same thought occurred to me. I don't think hard coding into firmware is the route to go even if it easy to do. I'm not a programmer so wouldn't be able to do that, not unless it could be easily explained. Also once fixed in the firmware there is the problem of resetting the configuration if required to do so.
Mike
Hey Alex!
Thank you for your quick response.
I have no experience in C programming but maybe I could arrange it somehow with someone. Generally I think it would be great to have this feature in the configuration tool as I am sure many others will want to do the same in the long run (everyone who wants to do bats and birds really!) and it wouldn't make the configuration tool much more complicated.
I am also curious to hear from others if they would appreciate the same functionality...
Hi Dominic, This isn't something that we've thought of, but the firrmware is open-source and it would be relatively straightforward to change the firmware to do this. If you have some experience of C programming, or you have a colleague who does, we can provide an updated version of the code where the various settings would be hard-coded into the firmware. You would then just have to use the 'Time Setter' app to set the clock before you used the device. This is an easier route than adding additional functionality into the configuration tool.