Terra Tuesday: Collecting data from butterfly tags!

It's Casey again, with another Terra Tuesday update. Yes, I know its Wednesday, but I wanted to wait another day so I could show you something cool. We have successfully collected 1 million pings from various Blu Morpho tags (the ones that are used on Monarch Butterfies) over the past 13 days! 

But sadly, there are no actual butterflies. Just lots of test Blu Morpho tags either being tested by engineers, or waiting to be delivered to many different customers around the world.  

The above test is the equivalent of 2,000 Terras receiving 500 tag beeps each in that 2 week period, which would be considered an extreme amount of activity. 

To those keen observers seeing the day and night pattern: the tag requires sunlight to operate, we don't see (many) at night. There are some since there are a few under artificial lighting. 

The above is our current database size in item count (the number of tags collected), the actual size, and the item size (the size of each record). We collect various meta data from the tag, such as signal strength, exact time of reception, and what Terra it is associated to, etc.

Our DynamoDB didn't break a sweat and even kept within AWS's "free tier"! While eventually we will have to pay cloud costs to support Terra, it is nice to see our tests incurred $0.

We will be using this same type of database for our 434MHz Motus receiver, as well as other aspects of Terra. 

Talk to you next week!