Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1172746
OCTOBER 2019 I SMT007 MAGAZINE 31 sometimes. We've been at this for four years, and before that, my inventor, Steve Gulick, had been at it for another four. Sometimes, it takes a while; you have to find the right group of collaborators to make something take off. Our growth and improvement have been exponen- tial in the last year and a half. Johnson: I can tell how passionate you are. Back to what you talked about earlier, from a system design perspective, that all sounds well-thought-out. How much of the hardware that you're using is custom? Dinerstein: A lot more than I'd like to admit (laughs). One of my friends who is an angel investor in a company that was bought by Altium—who is also now one of our spon- sors—told me what he learned while investing in the technology sector: "Don't invent hard- ware; invent software." Essentially, grab off- the-shelf stuff and use that. Well, we wish we could. And for some of our components, we certainly have. We don't build our own GSM or LoRa modems, etc. But the technology, as I said earlier, was decades old. Put another way, the major consumer of standard wildlife cam- era traps are white-tailed deer hunters who use them to figure out where the large bucks are before they go hunting. Now, most hunters use trail cameras. Overall, that was the market; there was no market signal to make devices that are more suitable for the needs of wildlife biologists or conservationists, so they end up using these camera traps that don't meet their needs. Again, they're expensive, bulky, and don't have any of the features that we have, such as AI and good connectivity. It's mostly weak GSM for those that have it, and they're expensive. So, the nearest wildlife camera trap that even has some of the functionality that we have is $1,300, and we're looking at sell- ing ours for around $450. The next generation we're doing with Intel and tinyGO will be even cheaper and more advanced with a chip that runs eight times faster and runs many more models. It's going to be disruptive, but we're not interested in competing. Let other companies continue to build their cameras for hunters; we're focused on the conservation side. Back to your question, there was no incen- tive to build hardware that met the needs of these other groups in the conservation arena. We had to create our own camera with the help of some brilliant engineers at Intel who provided assistance on the hardware and soft - ware. I affectionately call Steve Gulick the Thomas Edison of conservation technology because he has one brilliant idea after another; he's a great innovator, but it takes a team to make something work. We've been fortunate to work with great engineers over the last 16 months at Intel that have adopted this project as part of their social platform. We've been able to telescope this and do things we could never have done on our own. Also, Sigmatron International in Union City, California, built our prototypes, worked with us closely and provided a lot of help. Johnson: Undoubtedly, environmental ex- tremes are a factor. Who tackles that challenge? Dinerstein: Intel helped design the circuit boards and sourced components that work in extreme environments, and Sigmatron dealt with SMT and through-hole application. We've