Built in public — dead ends included.

Our science outreach is landing

A first, encouraging sign that serious science will engage with a $25-sensor project built in public: a leading elephant-bioacoustics researcher replied to our cold outreach. They couldn't take it on themselves, but they did something more useful — they pointed us toward specialists working on Asian elephants, the species that actually matters for the Thai and Andaman coast.

Small email, big signal. We're keeping the conversation private and nameless for now, but the door is open, and it's open in exactly the direction we needed. We call it our first win.

US entity: Delaware filing in progress

We're incorporating HERD Network, LLC in Delaware via Stripe Atlas — the filing is being processed this week. The tax ID (EIN) takes another 2–5 weeks after that, then US banking and the US payment account can open.

Why bother: bigger sponsorships need a clean US contracting entity. Until then, card payments keep running through our disclosed Singapore payment agent (WEST EAST TRADE GROUP PTE LTD) — the same line you see on every checkout page. Nothing hidden, nothing changed retroactively.

Channels: Instagram and Facebook are live, the film passed 100k

Our 90-second film about the elephants of December 2004 crossed ~100,000 views on YouTube. We opened the Instagram and Facebook channels and built a small publishing pipeline so field updates can go out the day they happen.

Honest note: the Instagram handle is ugly because every good one was taken. We care more about what's in the posts.

Why Proto-1 is three barometers, not one microphone

The first station design is locked: an ESP32-S3 with three BMP390 MEMS barometers, GPS time sync (PPS) and a 72-hour local buffer. Three sensors instead of one lets a single station reject local noise (a slammed door hits one sensor first; a real pressure wave hits all three coherently), and GPS-disciplined timestamps are what make cross-correlation between stations possible at all.

Status, plainly: the parts order (~$4k for the prototype run) has not been placed yet — that's the very next milestone, and the biggest open question in the whole project remains unanswered until Proto-1 listens through its first 72 hours: can a network of cheap barometers beat the noise?

The signal log is live

We opened the Signal Log — an open feed of significant seismic and volcanic events near our coastlines, logged for context with honest notes. HERD wasn't listening for these yet; they're exactly the class of events the network is being built to hear earlier and denser. In time, entries will carry what our own sensors recorded.