Attap:
Hi PaulS, undoubtedly you are correct but I have my reservations: a monkey can swing easily through the trees but might hassle opening a beer can. ... I don't believe that a non-tech person would want to change a microSD in the dark in the middle of a cane field.
Absolutely.
This sounds remarkably similar to another recent post. Is this something to do with setting up checkpoints for orienteering?
If this has to operate in the dark in the middle of a cane field, this would be useful to mention in your original post.
After reading the other post I think, as I said there, that an RFID system could work quite well. The advantage is the whole thing could be sealed since the reader would work through the side of a plastic box. You might put an led in a weatherproof hole to blink, and alert people where to find this reader while hacking their way through the cane field.
I don't like the idea of the USB port - after all a USB port out in the rain is hardly weatherproof.
What might work better would be to use radio - have a small transmitter inside, and when you press a button on the outside it sends all the data it collected to a nearby receiver carried by the "data collection" team. Or manage without the button even, just have "query/response".