• LWN.net: A subscriber-supported publication relying on subscribers to operate. Encourages readers to buy a subscription.
• Open Source Summit Europe (OSSEU): In September, Alex Bucknall gave a session overview. He works for the Arribada Initiative, a non-profit focused on open-source wildlife and ecosystem technology.
• Arribada Initiative: Has helped build various projects worldwide, including satellite transmitters on tortoises, thermal-imaging traps for pangolins, suction tags for manta rays, and penguin colony nest cameras.
• Seagrass: Only flowering marine plants forming meadows on the ocean floor, storing 10% of the oceans' buried carbon and producing significant oxygen. Critical habitat for marine species but declining at a rate of around 1.5% per year and 29% in the last 50 years.
• Camera "trap" for seagrass: Developed in partnership with local organizations in Bermuda to monitor seagrass. Uses a Zephyr RTOS on an open platform, with requirements like field configurability, low power, and open source.
• Device details: Generalized platform for time-lapse photos and sensing. Uses off-the-shelf hardware like Adafruit's Feather and FeatherWings with standard connectors. Chooses the Arducam Mega camera supported on multiple microcontrollers.
• Zephyr benefits: Allows choosing ready-made SoCs, has easy-to-use APIs for power management, networking, and sensing. Helps split development into drivers and application logic. New sensor drivers are constantly added. Uses devicetree overlays for easy hardware configuration.
• Deployment challenges: Includes building and delivering binaries, remote configuration, updates, and debugging. Zephyr Docker images are useful for CI testing. Zephyr shells help technicians in the field. Faces issues like vendor support and new hardware features.
• Other Zephyr projects: Currently used in a humanitarian-aid-tracking project in Ethiopia, an avian leg tag project, and a seaweed-monitoring project in the Philippines.
• Video and slides: A video from the seagrass-monitoring cameras is available on YouTube. Slides without the video are also provided.
• Future plans: Collect data from the deployed cameras in the next couple months and take it to the Darwin Initiative for further analysis. Hopes for more funding if needed.