This project began as public display or "kiosk"" for a Motus receiver station for the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) Ankeny Hill Nature Center. The goal is to engage public visitors to the site with a simple near-realtime display of current migratory bird tag detection events at the selected receiver. It presents a very simple limited number of screens that are easy to navigate.
The project has evolved to become useful beyond that original site and has been now been deployed at other organizations as both a public 'on site' kiosk and as a public accessible www website. The 'look' of the application (logos, colors, text content) is easily customizable.
When deployed as a kiosk, the user interacts with the application via a touchscreen display.
When deployed as a web site, the touchscreen interface is replaced by the users web browser so it fully accessible via the World Wide Web.
The Motus Wildlife Tracking System (Motus) is an international collaborative research network that uses coordinated automated radio telemetry to facilitate research and education on the ecology and conservation of migratory animals. Motus is a program of Birds Canada in partnership with collaborating researchers and organizations. Learn more at https://motus.org
Below are some example screen captures.
Figure 1 - Kiosk homepage
*Figure 2 - The Kiosk Receiver Detections tab panel
*Figure 3 - The Kiosk Receiver Detections map panel
*Figure 4 - Easily customized for your organization.
Any use or publication of the data presented through this application must conform to the terms of the Motus Collaboration Policy at https://motus.org/policy/ and ensure proper recognition of Motus, Birds Canada, Motus researchers and projects. You should have received a copy of the Motus Collaboration Policy document in this projects home directory when you downloaded the source code. Look for the file or find it at https://motus.org/policy/
- Richard Schramm, original author
- Patrick Lorch, Sr. Research Biologist, Southern Sierra Research Station plorch@southernsierraresearch.org
- Richard Schramm - schramm.r@gmail.com
Copyright 2022-2024 Richard Schramm - Corvallis, Oregon USA
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program source code when you obtained the software.
Please read BOTH the included LICENSE file and LICENSE_ADDITIONAL_PERMISSIONS. By downloading this software you are agreeing to be bound by all licensing terms as stated in these two documents.
I have quite successfully built and run the application in full kiosk mode on low-end Intel NUC PC computers with Window 10 Pro or Windows 11 Pro pre-installed. These are easily purchased used on eBay for as little as $100. Avoid any Windows 'Home Edition' versions.
I have also built and run the application on Apple Mac OSX (but not as a locked down kiosk).
These are the machines I have used:
- GEEKOM Mini PC Mini IT11, 11th Intel i7-11390H (Up to 5.00 GHz), 16GB DDR4 RAM 512GB M.2 SSD, Windows 11 Pro Mini NUC PC, Purchased new in 2026 for $400 on Amazon.
- NUC6CAY Celeron J3455 Processor 1.5Ghz 8GB Ram 120GB SSD w/wifi and Windows10 Pro (eBay $100)
- NUC7i5BNH MiniPC QuadCore i5-78260U 8Gb w/128Gb SSD w/wifi and Windows 11 Pro. (eBay $185)
- Apple Macbook Pro (circa 2018) 2.9 Ghz Intel core i9 32Gb w/macOS 12.6 (my development system)
- As of Winter 2026 it looks several PC options are available new online in the $400-$500 dollar range however prices appear to fluctuate due to tarifs.
The touchscreen I use is : Dell 24 Touchscreen Model P2424HT (Dell.com ~$450). Also the Viewsonic TD2760 which is a somewhat larger screen (27") at $530 new (found for much less on the used/ebay market)
USB Keyboard and Mouse
I strongly recommend Windows-11 PRO edition. Home Edition works too but with some additional headaches getting set up.
See 1_START_HERE.md in the project's top level documentation folder.