Building a team (with you?)
We are currently looking for students at the university of Freiburg, who want to join this wonderful project and write her/his master/bachelor thesis at our chair. At the moment, we are still evaluating our last field experiment where we equipped three cashmere goats with a new version of our tracker. The results are very promising…
A new design – a new experiment
It was time to see where we are: In cooperation with the Mundenhof Freiburg, we started a new field experiment. With a more sophisticated thermal adaption to our animal, extended electrical features and a more intelligent algorithm, we were hoping to see a device that promises to be closer to a useful device. But we…
Improving the thermal design of the tracker
A key point for a good energy income is the thermal design of the harvesting part. We are not only talking about the thermoelectric generator (TEG) itself, but also about its connection to the outer temperature difference. Here, we will briefly showcase the impact of the thermal resistivities on the TEGs power output. In an…
Fieldtest of the tracker in summer 2017
From monday, 24th of august, the first energy-autonomous tracker (without batteries), was tested in Freiburg. Our system was attached to a sheep as a collar, collecting for several days the temperature gradient at the TEGs, activity and energy-state of the system. All data was directly sent through a gateway on the farm to the webserver,…
Outstanding paper award at PowerMEMS 2017 in Kanazawa
Our paper „Development of a batteryless VHF-Beacon and tracker for mammals“ got the outstanding paper award at the international conference PowerMEMS 2017. At this conference we presented our first version of the tracker in a talk and also demonstrated the system in a live demo. As we had no sheep, we used a small peltier-element…
The aim of this project
In a rapidly changing environment and an ongoing decrease of habitats for wild animals, the investigation how to integrate and protect them is a growing demand of the public. The question how endangered animals like the wolf of lynx can be preserved and integrated in the cultural heritage of Germany is one of the most…