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I'm Phil, I'm a member of both Wiltshire and Gloucestershire Bat Groups, and I was a software developer for 40+ years until I retired from full-time working. My focus was always on performance maximisation - squeezing the maximum usability out of miminal hardware capability. In early 2021 I had just volunteered for the Bat Conservation Trust's "Bats in Churches" project when Raspberry Pi announced the Pico - an insanely cheap, but at first glance under-powered and under-featured embedded microcontroller with a restrictive "Thumb" instruction set. But it had a single-cycle multiplier, so with a quick "Hold my beer" I decided that a) I could make that thing sing as it was a good 20x more powerful than the Inmos Transputers I cut my teeth on, and b) I really fancied turning it into a bat detector for myself. The prototype hardware and software took just two weeks, then the complex work started. So now we are about 5 years on and there are many thousands of pipistrelle, pippyg and Griff devices in the field, doing citizen science and full-on, proper research everywhere from the UK, Germany, the mountains of Northern Spain and the South Island of New Zealand. And despite all the science / tech stuff going on here, my favourite bat project to date has been recording and mixing the audio component of my wife's gorgeous "On a Wing and a Prayer" art installation. Here's the audio - it may require a Soundcloud account to play it - recorded in 2022 on prototype pippyg recorders, and all recordings are from churches that we surveyed for the Bats in Churches project. I have to say a huge thank you to both Giada Giacomini and the late and great Claire Boothby, later Claire Goodwin, without whose patience and support during my early days of surveying and audio analysis I would have never got hooked on bats. Make no mistake, without them these devices would never have existed. We still miss Claire terribly, and I, and every user of my designs, owes Claire and Giada a huge debt of gratitude. Also, big thanks to Rachel Morley at Friends of Friendless Churches - she's the only reason I was aware of the Bats in Churches project, so ultimately this is all her fault 😀
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