The Cacophony Project
PurePods was founded by Grant Ryan, a serial inventor. Half of the founding shareholding profits are going to Grant’s not-for-profit The Cacophony Project. This project is focused on helping to make New Zealand predator-free so we can bring back “The Cacophony” of bird song.
The Cacophony Project believes with technology it is absolutely possible to make eradication of predators in New Zealand 80,000 times more efficient.
It starts with activating long life solar powered digital lures (sound and image) throughout New Zealand bush and gardens. The lures have the ability to entice pests from a greater distance than traditional food lures, and they use image recognition to identify and kill them with methods that do not need to be reset. This methodology also works close to 100% of the time.
Although there are currently many complexities with digital lures and fully automated trapping, it is a more promising option than traditional pest control for the following reasons:
- Potentially the lure can last 100 times longer than food traps, being solar powered (which also translates to vastly lower labour costs).
- Potentially will only require 1/100th the number of traditional traps, as they can operate over ten times the distance (100 times the area).
- One trap could target any pest: possum, rat, stoat, and feral cats. Hence ¼ the number of traps required.
- The kill percentage could be closer to 100% rather than less than 50% for many current traps.
Moore’s law means there is likely to be a consistent exponential drop in cost and or improvement in performance over time.
These collective improvements mean theoretically the traps could be 80,000 times more efficient: 100 (lure life) x 100 (trap intensity) x 4 (one trap, four pests) x 2 (kill ratio).
Although this does seem too good to be true, we have talked to numerous scientists and folks working in the industry who verify that it is possible.
Given the value to making New Zealand pest free we have set this up as a totally open source project so it can reach the goal as fast as possible. Anyone with solar power, audio/image and software development skills can contribute to developing the device. We will also need volunteers to set up devices around New Zealand to test the functionality.
We currently have a prototype device that has the following features:
- Solar powered
- Collects audio
- Uploads files to the cloud
- Ability to test audio and image lures
The Cacophony team has put a lot of work into building the data and project structures to make sure they are best-of-breed open source.
Please feel free to comment on or contribute to the project. Your input will directly help get rid of pests from New Zealand and bring back a cacophony of bird song.