TawakiCam: not dead, but sleeping

Early on Wednesday 28 October, TawakiCam went dark. The last image it sent us, at 6:56am (the camera ignores daylight savings), shows the erect-crested penguin colony on the Antipodes Islands in a full gale, with the females tucked down on their nests.

The culprit is a single small part: the power converter for the satellite dish that connects TawakiCam to the internet. After we had left the island last season, we learned that the manufacturer had recalled it. It has been slowly failing ever since, which explains the increasingly frequent dropouts as power outages rebooted the satellite dish over and over again. On Wednesday morning it finally gave up, and took the dish with it. Given it was a recalled part, we’re lucky it held out as long as it did.

From our telemetry data we can say that everything else on the island should be fine and simply waiting for us to reactivate the internet connection. We head back to the Antipodes at the end of the year, and the faulty converter will be the first thing to go. We hope to have TawakiCam live again by early January, just in time to see what has become of all the eggs we’ve been watching.

Until then, tawaki.cam is showing highlights from the island.