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Hacking GoPros to help save the Atlantic’s rarest bird
On a tiny volcanic island in Bermuda, a two-man conservation outfit is using DIY tech to help a ‘Lazarus’ bird species make a comeback.
“Basically, I ended up teaching myself,” he says of how he cobbled together the camera systems he needed — modular, waterproof, operable off the grid, able to auto-activate unobtrusively in the pitch dark, with lighting that would be invisible to the birds, and not to mention available at a grassroots conservation pricepoint. Then, he built his own light arrays with individual military-grade, 940-nanometer micro-LED bulbs, rigged with custom, laser-cut faceplates and transformers that would enable them to run off any power source (a car battery, for example) in the wilds of Nonsuch. And as the cofounder of blue tech rapid development facility Station B, he’s working with partners like Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Cornell, and MIT, testing and hardening gear for coral reef and ocean sensors, marine acoustics, and soundscape monitoring that he hopes will be affordable enough to deploy en masse.
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