Tag development - May-June 2020

New tag design :

A new design of the beacon has been developed following feedback from the tests and to improve the quality of reception of GPS signals and battery life. The new design of the tag integrates a slight increase (one centimetre per side) in the size of the ground plane on which the GPS antenna is fixed in order to improve the acquisition time and the quality of the GPS positioning, thus limiting and therefore optimising the tag's consumption. The second improvement this time concerns the size of the battery, which has been doubled in order to lengthen the tag lifespan.

In order to improve the detection of the surface when the turtle swims up to breathe and thus trigger the transfer of the collected data to the receiving stations, an automatic pressure sensor calibration algorithm has been added to the tag software to compensate for atmospheric pressure variations and correct any errors.

 

Embedded software development :

In parallel with the mechanical improvements of the tag, the software development of the tag has continued.

Thus the acquisition of several biological parameters was added to the embedded software, namely the turtle diving profile (development of a first version of a compression algorithm to describe depth profiles ), the minimum and maximum temperature, the diving time, the time at surface  and the maximum depth.

Not to mention the software developments linked to the LoRa network and other terrestrial infrastructures of the project as well as the numerous tests wich have been carried out.