More on: Newbury Electronics tracks animals

Yesterday it was announced that Newbury Electronics is to start a new electronic design services division called Newbury Innovations, and that the team transferring to the new entity had already designed some interesting electronics, including tags for tracking wild animals.

Here is some more on those tags.

They were created for the Swansea Live Animal Monitoring (SLAM) group, led by Professor Rory Wilson at Swansea University, are the size of a stamp, and weigh 3g.

Dr Mark Holton of SLAM approached Newbury Electronics with initial designs in the spring. From this, Holton and the firm developed the concept to get the smallest PCB that would still work with multiple sensors – see below.

To date Newbury Electronics has supplied around 200 of the sensor/loggers along with several dozen bespoke GPS logger, and timed release modules.

“We have been working on data analysis algorithms which, together with these devices, will certainly place us as a significant competitor within the animal research market place, said Holton, who is also MD of Swansea University spin-out Wildbyte Technologies.

The list of animals so far fitted with the trackers includes: badgers, beavers, camels, eagles, vultures, condors, whale sharks, turtles and humans – the latter to aid psychology and sports injury recovery through movement analysis, said Newbury.

Most recently was monitoring the movement of turtles off the west coast of Africa.

In this case the sensors detect movement and heading from accelerometer and geomagnetic sensors, along with light, temperature and depth – sensors are either on-board or blugged into the board.

Up to 75 million data points recorded over three weeks has been analyses to give an insight into behaviour under (movement and orientation, and depth) and at the surface (+GPS) including duration of dives, the number of breaths taken and foraging patterns at depth.

‘Daily Diary’ tag

• Weight: ~2g +battery +housing)


• Size ~27x26x8mm


• Accelerometer: 3axis 13bit resolution +/-16g (3.9mg/LSB)


• Magnetometer: 3axis 12bit resolution +/-1.3Ga


• Thermometer: -40 to +85°C (0.1°C)


• Air pressure: 300 to 1,100hPa (0.01hPa steps) Not active in sealed housing


• Depth sensor: down to 200m (resolution ~1m)


• Light – light dependent resistor (12bit) for dark to daylight transition


• logging rate: 60Hz max

steve bush

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via Yuichun