Sign In

 A need exists for Tiree to evaluate the effectiveness of bat boxes and monitor the populations of bat colonies in Canada with a device that can be attached to the bat boxes without interfering with the bats’ natural movement that is able to last through a season, easy to use and install, light on maintenance, and cost effective for volunteers. 

Our solution to this is to utilize infrared sensors to record the individual bat entries. We record said data utilizing an Arduino uno R3 powered by a 9v battery pack, which stores the acquired information onto an SD card, all being protected by a 3d printed protective case. The total cost of said project was $96.23.

Struggles relating to the duplicating our design:

For the case component there were multiple different prints as to get all the dimensions down perfectly as well as a good amount of manual alterations to smaller details, such as the pins connecting the top and bottom portions of the case. 

For the bat box itself, we ran into several problems. First of all, while laser cutting the different faces of the bat box, we hadn't considered the dimensions of the front face (it had to be tall enough to accomodate the 3D printed case), so we had to re-cut certain parts. While re-cutting, the laser had some trouble making clean cuts through the MDF, so certain pieces have some damage around the edges where we had to break it off from the main sheet of MDF. Then, we realized that the screws were too big for the thickness of MDF that we had (1/4inch), so we had to improvise and used a teammates screws from home. Then, when it came to assembling the box, we used clamps and a table saw to make the prototype accurate to our detailed design drawing, but we still had trouble making the box perfectly. For example, some sides were slightly unaligned, which caused some problems later when trying to align the sensors. 

Speaking of, we had a lot of trouble aligning the sensors. This was partially because they were very low-cost and of relatively low quality (even though it said on the website they were made for our size of bat box), so for the lasers to work they had to be perfectly aligned, down to the millimeter. Since the side plates of the bat box (the ones we were going to attach the lasers to) weren't perfectly aligned, it was extremely difficult to get the lasers themselves to align, and whenever we did, they were very sensitive and unaligned while transporting the device.