TurtleSense

Context

The Creative Conservation Alliance runs a wild tortoise preservation programme at Bhawal Reserve Forest in Bangladesh. I got involved through a friend from BRAC University who’d been working with them as a photographer.

Years earlier I’d helped them with a turtle-egg incubator. The hatchlings from that build are now part of an active recovery effort for an endangered species — which is probably the most disproportionate outcome I’ve ever gotten out of a small hardware project.

TurtleSense is the next thing. A mesh of environmental sensors around the preservation centre to monitor conditions across the reserve.

What I’m doing

The site survey turned up something useful: the place has 24/7 mains power with generator backup. I’d been planning around solar, expecting “middle of a forest” conditions; that constraint went away. So the architecture is just ESP32 and ESP8266 nodes over 2.4 GHz back to a NanoPi gateway running Node-RED. A few dozen sensors is well within what that stack handles.

Sensor coverage is the open question — what’s worth measuring, where, how often. The preservation team knows the biology; I’m there for the electronics. We’ll see what surfaces.

Outcome

This one is ongoing and quiet. If something publishable comes of it I’ll update here.

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This is pro-bono work, not commercial. Listed here because the engineering problem is real and I’m fond of it.