Hello!
I work for a non profit and we are currently using AudioMoths to conduct some bird research on our restoration sites in the San Joaquin Valley and Merced County in California. We thought we had them programed to drain the battery and fill the SD cards in ~30 days but we keep having about half of them die due to low voltage around 2-2.5 weeks.
Current set up and settings:
Model: Audiomoth 1.2.0
Schedule: 1min sleep / 29min recording between 5am-9am. March15-July 31.
Sample rate: 48kHZ
Gain: Med
Firmware: 1.11.0
Each day this will produce 8 files, each 167 MB, totaling 1336 MB. Daily energy consumption will be approximately 50mAh.
We originally deployed with Kirkland and duracell last year and had an issue with some of them dying before the 30 days. We thought maybe it was the heat (it gets up to 110F) and switching battery types would help. This year we deployed with Energizer Max in shadier areas and Energizer Ultimate lithium in sunny areas. We are still seeing the same results. We have 90 ARU's deployed across 11 sites. The early dying is happening at all sites but only for some of the ARU's.
A previous project we had they were deployed at Cibola, AZ but the schedule was 10min sleep / 1min recording for dawn and dusk. This makes me think it might have something to do with the recording time? Or maybe they aren't meant to be used for multiple years?
Any insight or recommendations?
Hi, Can you use the 'Summarise AudioMoth Files' in the Config App to generate a summary of the contents of an SD card. This will show how the voltage is changing over time. What SD cards are you using? Most shortened deployment times turn out to be due to SD cards using more energy than expected. The calculations are for SanDisk Extreme 32GB cards. Larger cards use a little more energy, but some cards can use 3 - 4 times as much (https://www.openacousticdevices.info/sd-card-guide). Alex