How it all began
All started with one problem: Human – elephant conflict
Elephant destroys crops of humans -> Humans kills elephants.
These conflicts can be avoided if we know the locations of the elephants. And that’s how the ELOC project started. Asanka from Sri Lanka came up with the idea several years ago to detect and locate elephants using elephant rumbles which travel very far because of their low frequency (infrasound).
My good friend Alex from Germany who oversees many elephant projects in South East Asia was fascinated by that idea and didn’t hesitate to get that project running. The team in Sri Lanka was born and Karl from Germany became the project leader. Alex convinced me to help out with the hardware development.
I am playing with IoT devices since years so knowledge and motivation totally fits the purpose. Only my programming skills are more on the script kiddy side 🙂
Luckily my friend and neighbor Tom is a programmer and it didn’t take long to make him part of the team. Since already one year we volunteer for that project and the fun hasn’t stopped yet 🙂
Two devices are being developed right now with slightly different purposes and approaches. One device from the Sri Lanka Team and the ELOC-S from the Sumatra team.
Several students from the university of Yogyakarta are making their theses on elephant sound and behavior. 30 ELOC-S devices have been successfully part of their research.
The ELOC Team
Alex (Founder)
Karl (Project leader)
Asanka (Project leader Team Sri Lanka)
Udayanga (Hardware developer Team Sri Lanka)
Tom (Software developer Team Sumatra)
Myself (Hardware developer Team Sumatra)
Two AI specialists from Amazon
AI specialist from Cornell University
And several students doing their master degrees within this field