Save the Turtles: One Squirtle at A Time

squirtle

🐢 Why We Chose Our Project 🐢

One of our ✨glorious✨ team members brought an emotional support Squirtle and we remembered how cool sea turtles were. Wanting to base our project around them, we did a little research and found that many wildlife conservation programs use NOAA satellites to track some released turtles to monitor migration patterns. We also learned that a big man-made threat to them was fishing boats casting nets in the migration paths. This inspired us to create a way to significantly reduce this issue by alerting fishing boats if they are in the vicinity of a tracked turtle.

🐢 What It Does 🐢

Since sea turtle conservatories track turtles through satellite-based GPS trackers placed on the turtles' backs, we decided to utilize this concept. To help fishing boats avoid turtles getting caught in their nets, we will compare the distance the turtle is from the boat based on the turtle's GPS coordinates transmitted by the tracker on the sea turtle's back. We implemented three different alarms to inform the fishing boats of the turtle's distance status, one at 2 meters or less, another between 2-4 meters, and the last at 4 meters or more. This will help the fishing boats determine the severity of the situation and react accordingly.

🐢 How We Made It 🐢

We had two ESP32 modules each representing a turtle and a boat. We connected the turtle and boat modules via Bluetooth. On the boat module, it is set to always receive while the turtle's module is set to always transmit. The turtle's module is transmitting its RSSI value to the boat module. An RSSI is a Received Signal Strength Indicator and measures how well the boat module can hear the signal from the turtle module on a scale of zero (meaning the turtle signal is very strong meaning that it is very close to the boat) to -120 (meaning the turtle signal is very far from the boat). Using this RSSI value, we can calculate the distance the turtle is from the boat. If the distance is over 4 meters, then the turtle is considered a safe distance away and the boat is notified of the turtle's presence. If the distance is between 2 and 4 meters, the turtle is considered to be at risk of injury and the fishing boat is notified. If the distance is less than 2 meters, the turtle is at severe risk and the fishing boat is notified visually and audibly.

🐢 Challenges 🐢

Communication between modules with massive amounts of Bluetooth noise
Limited RAM on modules
Sleep Deprivation
GUI

🐢 Accomplishments 🐢

Communication between two modules
Turtle Range Calculation
Alert System functioning based on range calculation
Plotted accurate lat/long coordinates of turtles based on the curvature of the Earth

🐢 Knowledge We Gained 🐢

Arduino IDE and Hardware
Pyserial
Wireless/Bluetooth Communication between Microcontrollers
GIT
Turtles don't breathe underwater!😃

🐢What We Would Do Next 🐢

We would love to connect with the wildlife conservatories to try to upgrade their trackers on the sea turtles to implement this idea. This would not only help with the endangerment of species but following their migration patterns more accurately, we could also be able to track mating/breeding spots more accurately allowing us to make those areas as safe as possible from any man-made threats.