Feedback: Improved sensitivity of light in the S1

Hi everyone,

I just spoke with Robert and he suggested to leave the following feedback behind.

We have made an interesting observation about the difference in traffic between Summer & Winter months in the region (Cork, IE, 51.9 Latitude). The ability to detect dull dark days reduced by lack of light is impacting the reliability of data quite a lot. Ireland is not the sunniest and bright place and has a lot of overcast days so it is the perfect way to stress-test for the S1.

Volunteer 1: Especially in December, a lot of data is lost due to it being dark outside! It’s really hard to have a good comparison between summer and winter unless you look at the hourly data and only compare numbers between say 9am and 4pm.

Volunteer 2: Between 9 am and 4 pm in the winter on the 50.9th latitude is not very impressive. You miss rush hour on a big proportion of the global population centres. The darkest days are in 2 weeks so than we probably miss another 20 minutes in the morning and afternoon for Cork.It would be grand if it can do 7 am and 6 pm all year round for 99% of the world’s population.

Volunteer 2: Here in Copenhagen they love traffic data and almost monthly you see pairs of two standing on streetcorners, at Bridges and at intersections manually counting traffic. They use this data to adapt roads. This is hard work and very cold around this time of the year. Cities like Copenhagen and Stockholm could be a big use case for Telraam, but we are at 55.6 latitudes and we have about 1,5 hours less of daylight than London and Cork on the Winter Solstace making the Telraam not that useful for the Nordics and other cities like Edinburgh, Glasgow and Tallinn.

Robert told me that the S2 would be more sensitive which I read on the official page as well, and I would love to see a concrete comparison in sensitivity. Maybe some numbers will be welcome and I think a lot of community members would love to participate in the comparison experiment.

Hi Kjeld, welcome to Telraam Talks! :slight_smile:

Yes, one of our expectations for S2, is to indeed be able to also count during dark conditions, because missing rush hour in winter is an issue. At this point, it’s too early to tell to what extend this will work. We’ll be releasing an update on the S2 shortly which will have more information (keep an eye on the blog!). In short, when we release the first version of S2 in March/April, we don’t expect it to be able to cope with dark conditions. However, the way S2 is setup, we can push improved detection scripts over the air. We’ll work on this in the course of '23 and we expect an improved detection algorithm with night counts will be ready before the next winter. No firm promises, but with what we know now, we think it’s solveable! :slight_smile:

Please do keep posting suggestions & browse the forum. Telraam Talks is fairly new, so we’re still growing the community. Do invite your Telraam-volunteers in Cork & Copenhagen to join the discussions here :slight_smile:

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