Developing custom instrumentation for detection of "Anomalous" fauna.

[JumboJimJabrony]

One of the main reasons why I joined the board here a week or two back (aside from the interesting stories and conversation that i've been privileged to read and take part in) was to get an insight from 

individuals going out into the field with regards to what has been tried, in terms of autonomous detection (i.e. cameras, microphones, etc..) to capture information on the presence of "bigfoot". 

By trade, I am electrical engineer/mixed-signal electronics designer, and in the past I've done work with low-power remote sensing apparatus (devices that go into the feild to detect various "things", and then in the 

presence of certain stimuli report back the associated data over cell network (typically)). 

In the past year or so, I've become convinced that there is something to this "phenomenon", but what has stumped me has been the lack of ability to gain any useful information via game cameras given their ubiquity 

in this field of research.  There is much speculation as to why; however, I want to know what considerations need to be made to the development of instruments given what is already known for the detection of a 

sasquatch. 

 

If the sasquatch is real and indeed does exist, then it must be possible to pick up it's presence via signatures that can be found in the environment it exists within. 

So say it's camera shy? that's fine, what about unique ground-vibration patterns that are produced as a result of it's being the only bipedal animal in the woods that

weighs far more than an average human being? just a single suggestion as it's common and has been done for people tracking for quite some time.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5775004

 

what I want to know is what ideas anyone may have based on their experience, or what short comings they believe existing "fauna" detection devices have that prevent them 

from gathering any information on a sasquatch. 

 

with the emergence of satellite based IOT communication devices that are pretty new to the market (https://swarm.space/),

could a battery powered device (or devices) be placed in remote areas with low power consumption capable of cellular (or satellite) transmission that could detect associated "bigfoot phenomenon"?

what would such devices be detecting and reporting back?

 

Any and all suggestions or insight on this matter would be tremendously appreciated. 

[NorthWind]

I don't know what it is about trail cameras, but they seem to be able to avoid them. The appearance of the device itself? The smell? The EMF? The sound of electronics charging? The IR? I don't know. I've thought about wrapping a camera in Faraday cloth, but haven't done it yet. I've also been thinking of a non-electric old school camera with a mechanical trigger. But @Madison5716 and I can confirm that they DO show up on thermal.

 

Good luck with it.

[Catmandoo]

On 5/18/2023 at 7:42 PM, JumboJimJabrony said:

with the emergence of satellite based IOT communication devices that are pretty new to the market (https://swarm.space/),

could a battery powered device (or devices) be placed in remote areas with low power consumption capable of cellular (or satellite) transmission that could detect associated "bigfoot phenomenon"?

 

Remote locations are not required. However, permissions / permits may be difficult or impossible to get. I view land as Government owned, State owned, private and land of indigenous peoples in the US.  Placing a Swarm system ground station looks to be something for private property.

It is my understanding that one can not leave an unattended trail camera in a National Park and that it will be confiscated as 'litter'.  So that puts the default camera location at an occupied campsite. Where I am at, one can not drive a nail / screw into a tree. Ratchet-straps are the friction method to hold your devices in place. Paper plate signage for camping get-togethers that is attached to trees and Forest Service reader boards is littering.

Campsite mode adds several degrees of potential curiosity. Sasquatch spy on us so make yourself a human(s) to be spied upon. If the Ravens show up, you are doing good.

 

Geophones have been posted about on this forum since about 2009. We know that Elephants dig up ground sensors and crush them.

Digging to bury geophones brings up the question of changing the ground balance ( mineral prospectors know about this ). I can not make any conclusions about animals and ground balance at this time. Some animals 'find' and dig up steel traps. I have wondered if they 'sense' the Fe⁺⁺ isotope like fish can.

We are back to having our listening devices in air, either attended or unattended.

 

Triple J, I am not telling you what to do but my comments for you to take under advisory are to check out NAWAC. They had a novel 'cocklebur' attachment method for a tracking device. I don't follow their activities but you may be able to share some info on the latest and greatest, bleeding-edge technology on transmitters and receivers.

[hiflier]

One thing that has always been on my mind is that no battery powered thermal that I know, or have heard of in the field, is off until triggered by motion similar to how trail cams are triggered. Is it because thermal imagers take time to boot and so miss living objects moving through the field? Since many cam subjects appear to be in no great hurry as they forage through the lack of a Glow, low glow, or no glow feature wouldn't be an issue with a thermal cam as the device wouldn't need a flash feature of any kind.

 

So IMHO a battery thermal that triggers on in the presence of a heat signature and has a variable shut off time between detection sequences, or can be set to video with multi-sequence capability as with trail cams would be ideal. Expensive? More than likely far more than a trail cam. Especially if it also possessed cellular transfer capabilities and a port to run a lithium battery equipped solar panel. For this particular kind of research, meaning Sasquatch, a thermal would be something I'd prefer.

 

@NorthWind The Faraday cloth would work but then maybe a cam, wrapped in tinfoil painted to blend into the environment (charcoal gray?) might work as well. It may also lend itself into configuring the wrap/covering into a shape other than a boxy looking thing?

 

Edited May 21, 2023 by hiflier

[Bonehead74]

On 5/18/2023 at 10:42 PM, JumboJimJabrony said:

If the sasquatch is real and indeed does exist...

Define real.

[JumboJimJabrony]

On 5/19/2023 at 9:00 AM, NorthWind said:

I don't know what it is about trail cameras, but they seem to be able to avoid them. The appearance of the device itself? The smell? The EMF? The sound of electronics charging? The IR? I don't know. I've thought about wrapping a camera in Faraday cloth, but haven't done it yet. I've also been thinking of a non-electric old school camera with a mechanical trigger. But @Madison5716 and I can confirm that they DO show up on thermal.

 

Good luck with it.

Thanks NorthWind! To your point about mechanical cameras I've seem some old film cameras with pressure plate triggers before. Old solutions in an analog world, but maybe analog is the most effective even if we can't quit pinpoint why. 

 

[JumboJimJabrony]

On 5/20/2023 at 12:59 AM, Catmandoo said:

 

Remote locations are not required. However, permissions / permits may be difficult or impossible to get. I view land as Government owned, State owned, private and land of indigenous peoples in the US.  Placing a Swarm system ground station looks to be something for private property.

It is my understanding that one can not leave an unattended trail camera in a National Park and that it will be confiscated as 'litter'.  So that puts the default camera location at an occupied campsite. Where I am at, one can not drive a nail / screw into a tree. Ratchet-straps are the friction method to hold your devices in place. Paper plate signage for camping get-togethers that is attached to trees and Forest Service reader boards is littering.

Campsite mode adds several degrees of potential curiosity. Sasquatch spy on us so make yourself a human(s) to be spied upon. If the Ravens show up, you are doing good.

 

Geophones have been posted about on this forum since about 2009. We know that Elephants dig up ground sensors and crush them.

Digging to bury geophones brings up the question of changing the ground balance ( mineral prospectors know about this ). I can not make any conclusions about animals and ground balance at this time. Some animals 'find' and dig up steel traps. I have wondered if they 'sense' the Fe⁺⁺ isotope like fish can.

We are back to having our listening devices in air, either attended or unattended.

 

Triple J, I am not telling you what to do but my comments for you to take under advisory are to check out NAWAC. They had a novel 'cocklebur' attachment method for a tracking device. I don't follow their activities but you may be able to share some info on the latest and greatest, bleeding-edge technology on transmitters and receivers.

There's a lot of really good stuff here Cat, lots to look at. I have gone about the process of placing equipment on federal land before as part of certain grants for "bio-sensors" and you aren't kidding, its not an easy or fun process! Most of it came down to knowing a guy....knowing a guy...etc.. and being associated with a university. Those two elements helped greatly, and even then, some of the best pilots for instruments came from simply knowing private individuals with land that butted up to the national parks and the price to place that equipment usually came down to a decent bottle of whisky and rare cooked steak! I'll dig into that post on the geophone usage and check into the NAWAC and see what they've done. Thank you tons for the information! 

[JumboJimJabrony]

9 hours ago, hiflier said:

One thing that has always been on my mind is that no battery powered thermal that I know, or have heard of in the field, is off until triggered by motion similar to how trail cams are triggered. Is it because thermal imagers take time to boot and so miss living objects moving through the field? Since many cam subjects appear to be in no great hurry as they forage through the lack of a Glow, low glow, or no glow feature wouldn't be an issue with a thermal cam as the device wouldn't need a flash feature of any kind.

 

So IMHO a battery thermal that triggers on in the presence of a heat signature and has a variable shut off time between detection sequences, or can be set to video with multi-sequence capability as with trail cams would be ideal. Expensive? More than likely far more than a trail cam. Especially if it also possessed cellular transfer capabilities and a port to run a lithium battery equipped solar panel. For this particular kind of research, meaning Sasquatch, a thermal would be something I'd prefer.

 

@NorthWind The Faraday cloth would work but then maybe a cam, wrapped in tinfoil painted to blend into the environment (charcoal gray?) might work as well. It may also lend itself into configuring the wrap/covering into a shape other than a boxy looking thing?

 

This is a point of contention I have with lots of off-the-shelf equipment. There is no data prior to the "trigger event", in the case of a cheaper game camera it looks to be mostly passive infrared sensors. To your point, I'm looking at what cold-boot of the CMOS sensor looks like in terms of sleep-to-first-frame time. If the first frame takes say, 500ms from the point of wake up, then it may not be fast enough. Something I've looked at is a low-power option for an FPGA with a decent amount of peripheral SRAM driving a simple 5MP cmos camera. Have it take 10 frames per second and write them to memory, have it do parallel pixel-to-pixel motion detection and if it finds motion then flag that image stack 

take for say... 60 seconds or so and transfer that to some non-volitile memory for collection later or transmission. Mabey have several such  devices like this in close proximity with a trigger signal and full 360 degrees of video.  If you're going for broke, then just bury some huge LiFe car batteries in a container and let it suck the juice. 

Not to digress too much, but to your point on this, absolutely revising the current imaging technology seems a great approach to this that I really like.  Thank you for the information! 

[JumboJimJabrony]

2 hours ago, Bonehead74 said:

Define real.

You know, that's a good question, and to be honest with you I only have a very shallow answer. I would say that, for me, for sasquatch to be "real" it would mean that the phenomenon encompasses (or stems from) something which has a tangible effect on the environment generated separate from the one observing the effect and separate

from others that might be trying to induce the effect of the phenomenon falsely. 

Really, all I can say is that I only know things are real because they have a detectable "presence" in the world that I can sense or observe in some way. I can't observe a free-flight neutron...but with a scintillator and a phototube I can detect them. That's to say, not everything that's real is something we can observe (YET!), but for it

to be observable it must be real. 

 

The aspect that sasquatch is an animal is the easiest to observe, so that's a good place to start I think. There's other phenomenon people seem to rationally associate with sasquatch including stone throwing, wood knocking, howling, floating orbs of light...etc. Maybe this is all the same phenomenon with the "hairy man" being only a single aspect, or it could be that some of these things are associated or it could be none are associated. I can't say because I don't have any real information to correlate these phenomenon, but I do have good reason to believe that all of these things do occur, and people do observe them, and in some cases they do leave evidence of their presence behind after occurring. 

 

I hope that this answers your question. For my own curiosity how could you define this phenomenon to be "real"? 

[WanderingLorax]

On 5/19/2023 at 6:00 AM, NorthWind said:

I don't know what it is about trail cameras, but they seem to be able to avoid them. The appearance of the device itself? The smell? The EMF? The sound of electronics charging? The IR? I don't know. I've thought about wrapping a camera in Faraday cloth, but haven't done it yet. I've also been thinking of a non-electric old school camera with a mechanical trigger. But @Madison5716 and I can confirm that they DO show up on thermal.

 

Good luck with it.

My friend has done just that. He claims to have some limited success. I’ve seen a couple pics, but I don’t hound him about them at all.

[JumboJimJabrony]

6 minutes ago, WanderingLorax said:

My friend has done just that. He claims to have some limited success. I’ve seen a couple pics, but I don’t hound him about them at all.

If I could ask, is his success in regard to the faraday cloth or the use of a mechanical camera?

[WanderingLorax]

4 minutes ago, JumboJimJabrony said:

If I could ask, is his success in regard to the faraday cloth or the use of a mechanical camera?

I’m sorry for not making that clear. He used faraday cloth.

[JumboJimJabrony]

1 minute ago, WanderingLorax said:

I’m sorry for not making that clear. He used faraday cloth.

No! thank you for clarifying! that's interesting. RF opaque housings for equipment might be a critical consideration. very interesting.

[Catmandoo]

13 hours ago, hiflier said:

@NorthWind The Faraday cloth would work but then maybe a cam, wrapped in tinfoil painted to blend into the environment (charcoal gray?) might work as well. It may also lend itself into configuring the wrap/covering into a shape other than a boxy looking thing?

Hiflier, check out Camohide from South Africa. Painted tinfoil? No.   Paint off gases and our color perception is different from animals. Camohide has a selection of stock bark patterns. They have DIY covers that one can paint to match local patterns. Paint selection needs careful thought. Camohide rates color #1 and bark pattern #2. DIY painting needs hot boxing or leave outside for a month in July to promote off gassing to minimize smell. 

 

3 hours ago, JumboJimJabrony said:

This is a point of contention I have with lots of off-the-shelf equipment. There is no data prior to the "trigger event",

What about widening the 'trigger event' field horizontally? What about the TrailMaster TM 550 passive infrared trail monitor?  Field of view (FOV) is 150 degrees, range out to 65' under ideal conditions. Records events with a time stamp. Targets that avoid the recording device but are in the 150 degree zone are time stamped. Typical trail camera FOV is about 40 degrees. I don't know what the FOV selection is on thermals. Horizontal action of a warm animal triggers the monitor 75 degrees from the instrument FOV axis. The beam angle is 4 degrees so at max range, everything triggers the monitor. One aims the TM 550 high to miss small animals in the near field.  The TM 550 can trigger multiple devices, runs on 4 C cells. Housing is Noryl plastic and does not absorb odors or moisture.

 

2 hours ago, JumboJimJabrony said:

RF opaque housings for equipment might be a critical consideration. very interesting.

 

I have not tried nickel doped paint / coatings on the inside of camera housings.

A different term: MuMetal shielding. Expensive and not easy to work with. Shields every day electronics, aircraft and satellites. Hazardous to your wallet and may cause a skin reaction. Most MuMetal materials do not like water.

 

Have fun searching

[Catmandoo]

Concealing equipment can be a challenge. Several approaches have been presented on this forum. Tree bark covering with local species, commercially available  materials in the way of ASAT fabrics and Cambush tapes. CamoHide from South Africa was designed to hide cameras from poachers. Interesting stuff. I was curious and bought the 'pine' version. The material had an 'industrial' smell. The method to attach the material to a tree conflicts with what I am allowed to do in my area. The snap fittings with screws don't work for me. I have not cut the material for a camera. A test that I have not done is the dry bark versus wet bark look. The texture is good. The back is a smooth surface. The snap fittings are situated around the perimeter. This might work for some researchers.