was approached a week ago by one of the teachers at my local high school who was Mr Delcourt. Mr. Delcourt teaches a class where they tag squirrels with these bands around their bellies in a forest areas. Then feeders with trail cams record and (Assumed, if not than students) lab assistants and the number of squirrels with and without the tags are recorded. This project was funded by the school but Mr. Delcourt had a better idea- glue a radio frequency identification tag on the the current tags and place readers on the feeders. He came to me and asked me about it and I gave him a working prototype in three days with the help of Adafruit. Used is a Arduino UNO, a Adafruit RFID/NFC shield based off the PN532, a Adafruit data logging shield with a built-in RTC and SD card reader, and a DC lithium ion battery charger with a 2W solar panel and a 6600 mAh battery. A JST cable goes from the NFC shield to the charger to easily disconnect and reconnect power. The reader reads a input like this-
0x3e 0x35 0x87 0x3D 0x23
Then it stores that value onto a SD card with a time stamp from the RTC, which then someone can take out the SD card and go through seeing which squirrel went onto the feeder. Some things we want to add in the next prototype would be a PIR or weight sensor to detect if a unIDed squirrel uses the feeder, a light sensor to tell the micro to go into a less power intensive state when it gets dark, a ATMEGA running at 8 mHz instead of the UNO's 16 mHz to use at lower voltages, and a circuit to allow us to use the solar panel even in dark days. One software feature we want to add is the ability to sleep for a second, read the sensors, record if there is one, then go back to sleep for a second. This project is very popular with the science teachers, and has the honor of being the first post on this blog! Comment down below and ask any question or state any comment, thanks guys for reading! If you want to download the software I made to record the battery's voltage over a period of time, take a look on my GitHub.