Greetings, I was hoping that someone might be able to give me a little direction on if BirdNET-Pi could be used on a LoRa Network to give real-time tracking of a target bird.
I am designing a bird conservation project, and one of our goals is to identify all natural nesting sites so that we can better understand the flock dynamics. We are looking to monitor known feed and watering sites, possibly using a device like a Songmeter or Audiomoth for long term monitoring to log visits. We would like to use that data to try and track our birds in real time, however most of the sites are not in a mobile coverage area.
I am wondering if the BirdNET-Pi could somehow be configured to communicate with us in realtime through a LoRa network. I was thinking that we could deploy a number of LoRa Devices and create a landscape level network, with BirdNET-Pi devices spread out across it, all trained to our target birds call. As I understand it, the LoRa couldn’t handle a data package like an audio file, but it could send us a signal if the BirdNET-Pi device had a positive identification.
Please excuse my complete lack of technical insight, this is not my area of expertise (I am more on the project development side). I do appreciate any insight anyone in this community could provide.
You should be able to use LoRa to transmit data stored in the logs by BirdNET, as you mentioned it won’t be up to the task of transmitting audio, but absolutely would be capable of taking info written to the logs and transmitting the info back to a base node.
It would absolutely require some coding to do, chatGPT is a great starting point to do the heavy lifting with the code and editing it to suit your needs.
At a high level and not knowing anything about BirdNET-Pi, I would say sure, why not.
In theory anything that can trigger an event could then call a lora/loraWAN module to send a message.
There are 3 key ways to use lora.
Peer to Peer (Basic Lora), fairly simple depending on modules chosen.
Pro. Can get some UART, AT+ commands to send and receive messages.
Good for a simple point to point
Con. Not native way to relay a message, so that would need to be added to the design thus potentially adding to complexity.
Mesh (Like 1 above with self managed relays) OR Mestastic with its API
Pro. Meshtastic is an existing project that can relay messages to nodes within range.
Con. Need to get Mestastic setup; “may” allow others to your your network to extend mestastic. If network gets too big it can get congested.
loraWan
This is nice if every node has line of site back to the loraWAN gateway, alows for dynamic channel selection and retries, can send data to IoT Servers in the cloud.
Con. Can require more skill to setup, needs line of site.
Keep in mind that if you have line of site between edge nodes and the base, then you should got 5Km+ range.
So all that said, I suspect a more detailed design would lead to the best way to do it.
One last tid-bit is keep in mind the lora is short message. So great for things like “event happened” message. Not ideal if you need to send bulk data. You often see a single message data size around 240 bytes.
Depeneding on setup and conditions and message size i 240 Byte message to get sent point to point start around sub 1 second with return ACK, but can grow out seveal seconds as more and more nodes get involed in any relay.
Key point, If your protocol has retries then the message should get threw but may not be as real time as you want/need. To get longer ranges you normal trade of speed for distance.
