Band-it

A new way of banding birds to account for human error in the field that's more efficient and reliable.

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Inspiration

I am not a computer scientist (Kristiana). I actually study Wildlife Ecology and Conservation. A lot of studies in my field use mark-recapture data. For larger animals this is fine, you just input a GPS tracker. However, for small animals, like birds, you have to just put a simple band on them. The problem is that due to the movement of the bird, human dyslexia, and the weather, a lot of the data is written down incorrectly. So we created band-it to help this process and make a more efficient way to do mark-recapture data.

What it does

Band-it is an android app where you can input data directly, mostly used for newly captured individuals, and also is able to take a picture of the tag and read that information. Once it reads the tag information it will pin the location f the individual and upload it to the datasheet.

How we built it

We used Android Studio to build our app and the programmed android OCR in our phones for recognition. We also used Firebase to store our database. We also used Google Cloud Maps to create a distribution survey of are already tagged individuals for reference.

Challenges we ran into

We originally wanted to use an NFC scanner but unfortunately, we got to the hardware lab too late. We also were working with only two people so we had a lot of work that couldn't be distributed. Finally, we had a hard time getting the camera to recognize the characters of the band especially when the band was colored. We also had a weird error where the camera would only work if we went to another app and then came back. This took us almost 4 hours to fix and really cut into our time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We finished which is always something to be proud of. We also did something I am super passionate about and stepped outside of our comfort zone because neither one of us had worked with Android Studio before so that was a lot of fun.

What we learned

We learned how to use android studio and debug some common problems with their OCR program. We also learned how to connect Firebase to our app which was kind of complicated for us.

What's next for Band-it

We would like to actually set up the app to be more realistic and easier to use in the field.

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