Awardee: Justin Touchon
Semester of Award: Spring 2017
Materials Awarded: 10 Android cell phones, 10 small waterproof pelican cases, 10 waterproof omnidirectional microphones and 10 mini plugs to connect microphones to the cell phones
Project Description:
We used the materials to build waterproof field recording devices using a freely available Android program called ARBIMON (Automated Remote Biodiversity Monitoring Network). The goal of the project was to cheaply replicate similar devices that are commercially available but which are relatively expensive. Unfortunately, in the process of building and testing the recorders, we learned that the Android phone processed sounds from the external microphone in a way that prevented their usage in the way we had envisioned. This could not have been known at the outset of the project, unfortunately. Thus, the project was largely unsuccessful. The phones themselves (without the external microphone) were used for one senior thesis in Biology, for recording bird calls on the VFEP, which allowed the student to track the amount of time that songbirds are calling throughout the day.