LambTracker: Open Source EID for the sheep industry

I should probably just have written a blog post about this, but busy getting ready to move to SF ;)

I met the author of this software over the weekend -- she runs a single-breed sheep farm in the North Fork valley in Colorado, and gathers data for the USDA, tracks the genetic lines of all their sheep, and so on. She was telling me that the commercial alternatives for the electronic tag-reading hardware can cost $1000+, but they were able to build a reader that communicates via Bluetooth with an Android device for less than $100: https://github.com/OogieM/sheep_eid_hw

Apparently a similar situation with the software to absorb and process that data, which is why she's writing LambTracker. Cool to see an entire market I didn't realize existed getting renovated from the inside.

It's pretty common for software/hardware for relatively specialised applications to be extremely expensive in proportion to their functionality, but with the increasingly popularity of open-source hardware/software the ability to DIY solutions is enhanced and I think this is a great example of what can be done.

At first glance, from the name I thought it would be a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracker_(music_software) !