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Low cost audiovisual playback and recording triggered by radio frequency identification using Raspberry Pi

, , , , ,
1 Department of Evolutionary Zoology, University of Debrecen, Debrecen, Hungary
2 Department of Biological Sciences, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA
3 Department of Biomedical Engineering and Mechanics, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA
4 Department of Biology, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA, USA
5 Department of Biology, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.742v1
Published
Accepted
Subject Areas
Animal Behavior
Keywords
RFID, automated playback, RPi, animal communication, Raspberry Pi, event logging
Copyright
© 2014 Lendvai et al.
Licence
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
Cite this article
Lendvai AZ, Akçay Ç, Weiss T, Haussmann MF, Moore IT, Bonier F. 2014. Low cost audiovisual playback and recording triggered by radio frequency identification using Raspberry Pi. PeerJ PrePrints 2:e742v1

Abstract

Carrying out playbacks of visual or audio stimuli to wild animals is a widely used experimental tool in behavioral ecology. In many cases, however, playback experiments are constrained by observer limitations such as the time observers can be present, or the accuracy of observation. These problems are particularly apparent when playbacks are triggered by specific events or are targeted to specific individuals. We developed a low-cost automated playback/recording system, using two field-deployable devices: radio-frequency identification (RFID) readers and Raspberry Pi micro-computers. This system detects a specific passive integrated transponder (PIT) tag attached to an individual, and subsequently plays back the stimuli, or records audio or visual information. To demonstrate the utility of this system, we tagged female and male tree swallows from two box-nesting populations with PIT tags and carried out playbacks of nestling begging calls every time females entered the nestbox over a six-hour period. We show that the RFID-Raspberry Pi system presents a versatile, low-cost, field-deployable system that can be adapted for many audio and visual playback purposes. The low cost and the small learning curve make this set-up a feasible system for use by field biologists.

Author Comment

This is a submission to PeerJ for review.

Supplemental Information

Suppl. Info 1

The python script controlling the communication between the RFID reader and the Raspberry Pi. The script initiates the event-triggered audiovisual playback/recording.

DOI: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.742v1/supp-1

Visit rate of male and female Tree Swallows and the rate at which the experimental playback was initiated

DOI: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.742v1/supp-2

Additional Information

Competing Interests

The authors declare they have no competing interests.

Author Contributions

Adam Z Lendvai conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Çağlar Akçay conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Talia Weiss conceived and designed the experiments, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Mark F. Haussmann contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Ignacio T Moore contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Frances Bonier contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Animal Ethics

The following information was supplied relating to ethical approvals (i.e., approving body and any reference numbers):

All procedures followed guidelines for animal care outlined by ASAB/ABS and the CCAC, and were approved by the Virginia Tech’s Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (#12-020) and the Canadian Wildlife Servive (#10771).

Field Study Permissions

The following information was supplied relating to field study approvals (i.e., approving body and any reference numbers):

All procedures followed guidelines for animal care outlined by ASAB/ABS and the CCAC, and were approved by the Virginia Tech’s Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (#12-020) and the Canadian Wildlife Servive (#10771).

Funding

Funding was provided by a U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) grant (FB, ITM, and MFH; IOS-1145625), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship (FB). During the preparation of the manuscript, ÁZL was supported by a Hungarian Scientific Research Fund (OTKA K113108). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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Low cost audiovisual playback and recording triggered by radio frequency identification using Raspberry Pi
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