VisionDesign complete (stages 1-6), not built

AirfieldWatch Survey Post

Solar camera posts that give wildlife biologists 24/7 survey data, advisory only

Fixed solar camera posts at a wildlife hazard assessment's survey stations count birds and flocks by day and mammals at night, build the per-station tables, and send advisory texts to wildlife staff.

Who buys it: Qualified Airport Wildlife Biologists and their firms running 12-month wildlife hazard assessments at non-hub and general-aviation airports.
Why it pays: Four posts rented for 12 months cost about $13.9k and watch about 35,000 station-hours, against roughly 100 hours of human point counts. A 12-month avian radar evaluation cost $133k (est.).
Target price: $290/post/month rental (Day), $450 with thermal; or $3,900 / $6,400 + $49/post/month (target)
First-minute wow: A month of dawn, day, dusk and night counts for every survey station, in the same table layout as the assessment report.

See the CAD design Concept page

AirfieldWatch Survey Post concept: the idea and where each part goes — The concept. The CAD design is below, under Printable CAD.

What the research found

And how this design answers it

Airport RFPs and integrators -> sold or rented to the biologist as a survey instrument under the existing assessment
Pan-tilt turret at $8,900+ and 40-60 W -> fixed-sector solar post with no moving parts, about 8-10 W
Automatic dispersal near aircraft -> removed; texts to wildlife staff are advisory and staff decide
Species claims from pixels -> the post counts size class and flocks; species come from the biologist's labels
Range marketing -> ranges computed from pixel size per lens and stated in the survey plan
Cameras become perches -> anti-perch ridges on the hood and spikes on the mast cap

Use case

12-month wildlife hazard assessment at a regional airport

Airport wildlife biologistAirport operations managerWildlife patrol staff

01Trigger: the airport must do an assessment after a damaging strike
02Deploy: the biologist places 4 posts at survey stations outside the runway safety and object-free areas
03Detect: the posts log birds by size class and flock day and night, and text staff when 25+ large birds loaf at the pond
04Act: each month the biologist labels the review queue and exports station tables for the report

Outcome: Recommendations backed by about 35,000 station-hours of data for $13.9k of rental (est.)

How it works

Architecture

01
Sense: Pi HQ camera with a 16 mm or 6 mm lens, plus a FLIR Boson 320 thermal core behind germanium on the night model
02
Decide: Raspberry Pi 5 + Hailo-8L runs motion masks, tiled detection and tracking on the post
03
Send: event records and thumbnails over LTE (MQTT/TLS); clips only for review
04
Tell: advisory texts to wildlife staff; review queue and station tables for the biologist

Hardware

Real parts, buyable today

Bill of materials: about $1,300 per Day post and $3,300 per Day+Night post (est.).

Block	Part	Why this part
Compute	Raspberry Pi 5 8GB + AI HAT+ 13 TOPS (Hailo-8L)	Same software image as the Edge Hub at about 6 W
Visible	Raspberry Pi HQ Camera (IMX477) + 16 mm C-mount lens	A large bird spans 12 px out to about 500 m
Thermal	Teledyne FLIR Boson 320, 24 degrees	A deer spans 6 px out to about 200 m at night; US-made core
Power	Victron SmartSolar MPPT 75/10 + 100 W panel + 100 Ah LiFePO4	About 5.7 days with no sun; no trenching near runways
Uplink	SIM7600G-H LTE dongle with GNSS	Events and time from the far side of the airfield

Mechanical

Printable CAD

12 parts, generated from code and checked as closed solids. Pick a part to inspect it, or download the STL files to print.

See the CAD parts render

AirfieldWatch Survey Post printable parts, rendered from the CAD — Render of the printable parts from the actual CAD. Not yet printed or photographed.

Loading the CAD…

Real CAD · drag to rotate · scroll to zoomReal CAD · swipe sideways

Open risks we are working on

Small market: biologist firms may not rent enough posts to pay for support
Small-bird recall at range on a Hailo-8L with tiling is unproven
Airport siting approvals and LTE coverage can delay deployments
Boson thermal cost and export variants; the Lepton fence model is the fallback

Design stage only: nothing on this page is for sale. Specifications and prices are targets.