I am a graduate student working on a somewhat unusual project. I am not a very tech savvy person which is why I am reaching out on this forum to hopefully get some insight. What I want to do is monitor the heart rate of birds while they are sitting on their nest. I plan to design an artificial egg that can be placed in the nest for monitoring purposes. Inside this egg I will put an omnidirectional electret microphone to record heart rate. What I need help with is determining which board would be best for my needs. It looks like the arduino 101 board already has been developed to monitor heart rate with CurieBLE. This seems like it might be a good place to start. My main considerations for choosing components are size, power, and data storage. The sensor (microphone), power, and board all need to fit inside an egg approximately goose size which is a bit larger than a chicken egg. For data logging, I think it might be easier to transmit via bluetooth or something to a receiver located outside the nest. This receiver can be much bigger than a egg. Ideally, I would have eggs in multiple nests transmitting on different frequencies to a central receiver. I need this system to be powered autonomously for a minimum of 15 days, 30 would be better. For this reason, I want to find components that minimize power consumption. I also will have quite a lot of data being stored and am not sure the best route to take. I have a crude understanding of the various components for this project but don't really know how to integrate it into a working prototype. If anyone out there has any recommendations of boards, or other considerations, I would appreciate any advice.
Hi,
You have a lot to work out here, but an interesting project.
An Arduino Pro Mini may be a good choice. It can fit in a pingpong ball. (See THIS PAGE) which has pointers to information, a layout diagram and a schematic.
DISCLAIMER: Mentioned stuff from my own shop... here..
I expect you will need an amplifier after the electret microphone to get good data range.
Do you plan to record all the audio and process it later? A LOT of data. If you process it in the Arduino then you may have a small amount of data depending on how often you log the rate.
Does the 'egg' need to be totally self-contained?? (No wires out of the nest)??
You may need to look into power saving techniques. Nick Gammon has done a lot of work on this.. See THIS LINK.
Oh: What species of bird? The Grosbeaks and Red-Winged Blackbirds just showed up in Vermont yesterday.
Wow! What a wonderful idea! As a keen twitcher, I am very interested in following you on this thread to see how you get on with this interesting project.