A Great Number of Issues Indeed: Week 5
Josh n -
What’s up guys! Sorry for the lateness, all the important things happen the day after blogs are due for me so you win some you lose some. This week I’m gonna talk about the seemingly never ending issues I am having with our camera situation, starting from the top. I think this info had been relayed throughout the rest of my posts but I can consolidate it here again.
So initially we ordered two WYZE home surveillance cameras that one of my advisors was familiar with. These recorded in color 24/7 so they seemed ideal, however what we didn’t know was that they need Wi-Fi to get updates, which happens often enough, and if they don’t update they just stop recording. We have Wi-Fi on the inside part of the vivarium but it isn’t consistent enough outside for us to feel comfortable about it. So, they sent NAU’s electrical department a couple of tickets, the first to try to install Wi-Fi outdoors, and the second to try to reconnect a streaming camera that was already set up in my target enclosure from a while ago to see if that could help us. After a few weeks, NAU finally gave us estimates on time and costs to do these, and they were definitely over budget in both categories. So, Morgan reached out to a friend who’s friend (I think, maybe aunt idk) had a couple of trail cameras that they were willing to let us borrow. Morgan got them and started charging one of their batteries over spring break, and when I got back in town we set them up for the trial run you all read about last week. Everything seemed fine then, and for the most part it was, but there were definitely some big issues I discovered today.
First, I don’t have a google drive with enough space to hold a fraction of the videos (which are only going to get bigger with my most recent settings). So, they are all currently just on my laptop, which forks for now but it means my advisors can’t see them which is an issue. Morgan offered to bring in an external hard drive, which would solve the space issue but not the communal viewing issue, so we’ll see what can happen there. The next issue was that one of the cameras’ memory cards was full. This one was the one that the original owner had used exclusively so there was already a lot of space taken up. For this one we might just have to delete stuff once we have it somewhere else we’ll have to see. Both of these issues however are going to get a lot worse, because I realized that the videos were too small, cutting off after 30 seconds, which would definitely mess with data collection. So, I changed them to scan for movement every five seconds, and then record for an hour afterwards. This is gonna be rough to try to store, but we’ll figure it out. Finally one of the cameras is getting low on battery as well, so I switched out the batteries so that we would have one camera with free space on it’s card and the most charge it could. I also went two for two on turning off my computer instead of ejecting the SD card too so that’s fun.
In the end, there are definitely a lot of problems I am going to have to work out with this process, but hopefully they shouldn’t take too long so I can still get some good data. Thanks for reading, I’ll see y’all next week.
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