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A project log for Hummingbird Heartbeats

I'm working with a bird researcher in Panama to use non-invasive techniques for measuring hummingbird heartbeats

joel-murphyJoel Murphy 03/14/2022 at 20:330 Comments

Lots of updates happened over the weekend. Got to ship out this week !

Components are soldered in, mostly.

I used nail polish to 'conformally coat' the exposed circuitry on the sensors.

Turns out that the accelerometer that I have in my bins is +-16g. That's way to sloppy for the kind of movement noise we're hoping to find. I've put in a purchase for a +-3g sensor in the same family.

I'm using the Time library to timestamp the files. There's only limited metadata written to the CSV files. This could be improved, but not necessary since the recording will take place alongside other data collection and logging logs.

The blue LED pulses when it's idle, and then turns off and the red LED lights during recording. I modified the 1/2 size breadboard case files from Adafruit's PermaProto page. I gave it a bit more of a 'strain relief' on the USB cable, and a guide/support for the SD card removal/insertion. You can get the STL files from the 2022 branch of the git repo. I printed on my TAZ Mini 2 very successfully.

There's a coin cell to keep the Teensy 3.6 RTC alive. That's mostly for a future feature to make it more portable. I've rarely worked with the Adafruit solderable breadboard, but I gotta say, it's pretty nice and forgiving to work with !  

boarded and boxed


conformal coating

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