Has anyone created a public display or kiosk for a MOTUS receiver station that would suitable for a visitor center? The goal is to engage public visitors to our site with some simple near-realtime display of tag events and some descriptor of what MOTUS is about. Possibly a touch-screen display and very simple limited number of screens a child and parents can navigate.
We would like to leverage any share-ware software already developed rather than rolling our own. Thanks for any leads!
I’d be interested in this too as we would like to have such a kiosk at our nature center in downtown Wilmington Delaware where there is a Motus station (installed by the North East Motus collaboration). The simplest idea so far is to have a dedicated laptop inside the visitor center set to the Motus homepage with instructions on how to navigate it (after training the desk staff so they can help people use it). Maybe a laptop could be connected to a larger monitor so more visitors can view it at once?
For what it’s worth we came up with a short video recently explaining to people who visit our nature center what the mystery tower is and also giving instructions on how to navigate the Motus website so people can see for themselves which animals are being detected by this tower (or any other tower they are curious about). I hope it’s okay to post this here, it has been a very productive tower.
You can view the SensorGnome easily by a website, so that people can
see which detections are made if there is also a tagdatabase is
uploaded. Or the link of the station on Motus where people can see the
more validated, but not real time detections... Just soms suggestions.
I’d be interested in this too as we would like to have such a kiosk at our nature center in downtown Wilmington Delaware where there is a Motus station (installed by the North East Motus collaboration). The simplest idea so far is to have a dedicated laptop inside the visitor center set to the Motus homepage with instructions on how to navigate it (after training the desk staff so they can help people use it). Maybe a laptop could be connected to a larger monitor so more visitors can view it at once?
For what it’s worth we came up with a short video recently explaining to people who visit our nature center what the mystery tower is and also giving instructions on how to navigate the Motus website so people can see for themselves which animals are being detected by this tower (or any other tower they are curious about). I hope it’s okay to post this here, it has been a very productive tower.
Last year at Motus Fest part 2, which was all about the Outreach and Educational possibilities associated with Motus, I volunteered to lead a working group of sorts to begin the conversation about how to get public-facing displays or interactive kiosks designed and made for visitors centers (you can check out a video of Motus Fest 1 and 2 toward the bottom of this page: https://motus.org/collaboratives/). Many hosts of Motus stations are very interested in this, and keen to see something that could be relatively plug and play. In some cases a nature center or zoo or wildlife refuge might want to brand the interactive content, but the core of it could be something easily created and shared widely. I’ve been dragging my feet on getting this going because I know there are some really exciting things coming down the pipe in regards to the Motus website that could make this kiosk idea much easier. But, maybe it’s time to meet!
I’d like to get a group of people/organizations who are interested in this together at some point this spring (April / May timeframe) to begin discussions about how we could work together to develop something. Please email me if this is a conversation or group that you’d like to participate in. Once I get a few responses, I’ll create a doodle poll and find a time where the most people could meet. I’ll plan to record the discussions and make them available to others as we get the ball rolling. Let me know if you’d like to be a part of this!
Perhaps a QR code so they can access the MOTUS home page on their personal device? That way you wouldn’t have to maintain a laptop. Anyway, just a thought.
Has any further progress happened on this? I’ve got some time on my hands and some decent experience doing data visualization type stuff, so I would love to dive in! Anyone working in this area?
Chris … I made some solo progress on a kiosk that comes close to what I originally proposed for our nature center. I have it up and running on cheap (~$300 on ebay) Intel NUC w/Windows-10 and a Dell 24" P2418HT touchscreen ($400). I sort-of back-burnered it after the proof-of-concept stage as our Motus station install has been delayed. Its programmed in R, and uses “Shiny” running local on the PC for the dashboard (https://rstudio.github.io/shinydashboard/index.html). The NUC boots into the mozzilla ‘Open Kiosk’ in full-screen mode to prevent a public user from accessing anything other than the intended screens.
I also made the dashboard temporarily viewable as a website page at shiny.io so that our nature center team could comment on it during development. (It is not my intention that it be a production web-site as I dont want that admin overhead and costs that comes with it hosting a web site - but you could go that route if you choose). I just restarted it so you could take it for a test drive at https://rschramm.shinyapps.io/ankenykiosk/ to see if its worth pursuing further.
The Shiny app is making http calls to the public MOTUS server and scrapes the return results. Its currently hard-wired to query data for a single specific Motus receiver in Bandon Oregon using its receiver ID.
I havent cleaned up the code for public consumption and of course documentation is sparse at this point. Im about to leave town for 4 weeks but we could discuss next steps if you are interested. One obvious need on the graphics side is to filter the flight path of individual birds to eliminate wild points, and also it would be nice to have the map display major location names so users could get a better sense of location etc. Ive also thought of adding a tab to the dashboard to link to some pictures or natural history of the birds detected… Also - credits and citations need work also before rolling out.
Please let me know what you think - I’d love to have a collaborator to work with.
Include me in this loop too. I have a ton of experience with R, and less with Rshiny apps. But I also have experience with leaflet maps in R, with writing interpretive apps and with using R to query the Motus database. What I lack is time, but I will help when I can.
It looks really awesome! Only the maps I much more prefer a Google
(hybrid) layer as background. It is as Kiosk very helpfull; much
better than the Motus website that is for outsiders a bit sloppy to
start with and find your way to the tracks in first attempts.
Very well done! I have fear to ask, but is this easy to use for other stations?
Very cool work, Rich. I’m looping in Jess Gorzo who has played around with R Shiny and has extensive R experience too (but like everyone, lacks in available time!). Either way, another great resource to bounce stuff off of.
I’m really excited to see what others are able to contribute to collectively move the visualization of Motus data forward.
Cheers,
David
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Thanks for showing this Rich. Very cool! I’m not a R guy m’self, I’m more of a Processing and JavaScript type. But I’m psyched to start mucking about. To begin with the most basic, is there a http(s) API to Motus available? Or is using a R package the only way to access the data? I sure hope not!
Chris - I am not making use of the MOTUS R package at this point. I am only making http requests to the motus.org data servers for public “Basic open-access dataset”. That dataset is the coarse “summary-level detection information”. I ‘scrape’ the return results using an R package called rvest. The summary-level detection information is low-resolution lat/lon and filtered which is perfectly fine for my application.
The drawback to web scraping of course is it is an unpublished, undocumented API (as far I as I know) and so results returned could possibly changed at any time motus updates their web server and potentially break my code.
We do not have a timeline for this yet, but we are planning to add more capability to the API and the R package to pull summarized data at some point, which would potentially allow this type of use in a more formal way, and including some guidelines about acceptable use, and ensuring recognition of Motus and projects, etc.
Well I am jumping in to the deep end ! I have posted my Kiosk code and documentation to a public github repository. If you have a github account you should now be able to see and clone it at:
It’s working prototype is still visible at https://rschramm.shinyapps.io/ankenykiosk/ (it sometimes takes a few seconds to load as its a free hosting service and they take their time spinning it up if its been idle)
If anyone tries it out at home, I’d love to hear about your experiences. I would also welcome any collaborators willing to make help improvements!
FYI - I just released a new version (v3.3.0) of the Kiosk app that implements a dropdown picklist configurable for multiple receivers in our area of interest. Also now includes a “species” tab panel that can be used to display static html pages describing the detected animal. Enjoy. -Rich
I have just publicly released MOTUS_KIOSK Version 5 on github at https://github.com/rschramm9/MOTUS_KIOSK.
Motus Kiosk is an interactive display suitable for a nature center or wildlife refuge visitor center to connect visitors with live summary level detection data from Motus receivers at or near their sites.
V5 includes a major refactoring and directory restructure to separate code from site-specific content. The intent is to make it much easier for adopters to create and maintain their own kiosk sites, or multiple sites. Also includes a significant rewrite of documentation pages. ANKENY_MOTUS_KIOSK V4.x site is still on github but users are encouraged to migrate to V5.