Olympus LS-10 remote control success

I’d experimented with the wired remote for the Olympus LS- series recorders before. I have an Olympus LS-10 and an LS-14, and previous experiments showed I could make this work in principle. There’s a big gap between making it work on the bench and getting it to work in the field, however. This is the next step of boxing it up and making it stand alone.

Either my LS10 is knackered or it never was compatible with Olympus’s wireless remote, it doesn’t provide 3.3V power on the plug tip, so I have to power the PIC 16F628 from two NiMH cells, which means I am short of headroom for 3.3V because there’s a 0.9V difference. I’d expect the PIC to drag the remote control line, which rests at 3.3V down to ~ 3V (2.4V VCC + 0.6V input protection diode drop)

I used a diode for the stop command pulling to ground, which still works with that diode drop, so the drive circuit is

RA4 is an open-drain connection, I figured I would chance the forward-biasing of the input protection diodes via the 100k. It works fine, at least at room temp – a 100ms pull to gnd via RA4 starts the recording, and then a 100ms pull to ground of RA2 stops the recording. Pins are switched to hi-Z inputs when not active. I guess the 3V3 from the LS10 has to go through two diode drops now to get to the 2.4V rail (diode shown and the input protection diode), and this is enough to let it float OK.

I got it to start the recorder at 4am, which is too early, but recording for two hours got me this recording at about 5:30 am of the local birds. I hear Great tit, Robin, Blackbird, some sort of gull, Wren, Woodpigeon, Crow, in that lot.

Using a 3.5mm socket as a workaround for the fiddly 4-pole 2.5mm jack plug – it’s a lot easier to wire a socket than a 4-pole plug, and I got a 4-pole 3.5mm jack to 4-pole 2.5mm jack cable from Ebay. Wiring the 4-way socket is dead easy now, and saves having a flying lead from the box.

In search of microphone weatherproofing ideas

I need to now find a way to get a reasonably weatherproof microphone. Looking at how B&K do this in the manual for the UA1404 the way to go is to use a small raincover just over the mic capsule

Their mention of birds makes me thing this is very close to a mesh nut feeder – I could put horticultural fleece around the mesh and use the top cap as a rain guard. Another option is to go minimalist, recess an omni electret capsule in something like a plastic bottle cap. I’d have thought that the cavity of the raincover would cause dreadful resonances, but if it is say 2cm diameter that would be a wavelength of 330/.02 ~ 16kHz – perhaps theirs is 0.5cm keeping this down to ¼ wavelength. Where this would score is it’s small, and electret mic capsules are cheap so I could afford to lose some. I can take the line that I’ll omit the big foam guard and use a piece of horticultural fleece across the cap, this makes a reasonable wind baffle, and I’m not going to get a good recording if the wind is over 5 mph anyway because of the hiss of the wind in the trees even if I were to keep wind blast out of the mics.

I am thinking of using a small Dribox to rig the recorder and timer, and sample some birdsong from other places. A pair of AAs run the timer for at least three days and the power drain of the LS10 on standby is also low, probably good for a couple of days, but I don’t have more than four hours of recording time on the LS10, it is 2Gb. So I can live with that – the Dribox has enough room for a bigger battery if that starts to look necessary.