Locating Bats In Flight with Batinator

It is not easy to spot bat wings given their rapid speed of flying and dim lights in which they take flight. You may, thus, never get a fair chance to take a good look at their wings. Even if you are flashing your lights at them, they may never allow you to have a good look at them or spot them on the first basis.

Now comes in the batinator, a portable device based on Raspberry Pi along with an Pi NoIR camera on it. It is also embedded with a wide array of IR lights that illuminate the bats in view. It can be seen in the infra-red spectrum. Martin Mander, the designer of this project, established this device to register 90 frames per second which makes it big enough to record the rapid flappings of its wings in a very slow motion. It is powered by a 12v rechargeable drill type battery that give it a look of some kind of investigation device. It looks quite familiar to the hand-held bat scanner used by police.

Locating Bats

You can read all instructions from Martin in instructables, in case you are planning to make one of your own. The video he has prepares to showcase the working of this device is that of taking care of a lightning storm. However, the same can be used for bat spotting. You can always use the device for storm filming. In the video you will see the device he has built and how he has assembled all components and how people can use it to lure bats.