Cellular Tracking Technologies has developed two wildlife telemetry devices, FlickerGPS and FlickerCL, designed for monitoring the migration patterns of small species such as American Robin, Green Jay, Sharp-shinned Hawk, and Northern Saw-whet Owl. The compact devices come in a form factor small enough to not impact the animal's behavior and weigh less than 3% of the animal's weight.
Both versions feature:
- A 3-axis accelerometer for detecting mortality and activity levels
- Battery and solar power
- Algorithms for identifying specific behaviors such as roosting, flight, and foraging
The main processor for the integrated sensors is the Nordic nRF9160 low power System-in-Package (SiP) with integrated LTE-M/NB-IoT modem and GNSS. This device is ideal for space-constrained applications due to its miniaturized package and features, including:
- 64 MHz Arm Cortex-M33 application processor
- Flash and RAM
- Modem
- PMIC
- GNSS
- RF front end
The nRF9160 SiP provides GNSS positioning and cellular IoT connectivity, which allows for the location and behavioral data of the animal to be transmitted to the cloud using Nordic's nRF Cloud Location Services. This service offers fast and power-efficient location details using single and multicell locations.
Users can view the captured data through a web-based data portal or the "CTT Flicker" iOS app. From these platforms, the user can see the animal's location on a map, view sensor data through charts, and update device configurations over-the-air.
