Spartan cellular cameras

How to integrate Spartan 4G/LTE cameras with Animl

Not official Spartan documentation!

This documentation is intended to supplement the Spartan Camera user manual, which can be found here.

Animl does not support video

Some Spartan cellular camera models support recording video, but Animl only supports the ingestion and processing of still images. Please keep video mode disabled.

Overview

Integrating Spartan 4G/LTE cameras with Animl is a four step process:

1. Set up and activate your Spartan Camera - Camera setup and activation is out of the scope of this documentation, but instructions can be found in Spartan's user manual.

2. Enroll in Spartan's "Premium Service" plan - In order to send automated email alerts, which is required to ingest images into Animl, you must use Spartan's Premium Service.

3. Configure your camera to send email alerts - Animl scrapes and ingests Spartan emails that contain images sent to [e-mail].

4. Register your camera's "serial number" with Animl - In order for Animl to route your images to your Project, you first need to register it.

More detailed instructions on steps 3-4 can be found below.

Configuring your camera to send email alerts

After activating your camera and enrolling in Spartan's Premium Service (steps 1-2 above), you will need to configure your camera to send emails to [e-mail]. This can be done through the Spartan Web Portal (https://my.spartancamera.com/shop/ssologin).

Email alerts

Once you've logged in, navigate to Account > Email Delivery > Email Contacts and add [e-mail]:

You may also want to add a personal email address temporarily to confirm sure the cameras are sending alerts.

Next, navigate to Account > Email Delivery > Delivery Options to make sure that for each new camera, [e-mail] is checked ON under the "Email Recipients For: <Camera>" section.

Thumbnail settings

We recommend setting your thumbnails to "large". The larger the thumbnail that gets sent along with the emails, the more pixels Animl's AI models have to work with, and the more accurate the predictions will be. However there are battery/solar and data usage tradeoffs associated with sending larger images and thumbnails.

Good guidance on which image and thumbnail size settings should be used for different Spartan camera models in different circumstances can be found here.

Register the camera with your Animl Project

The final step is to register the new cameras with your Animl Project.

Before you leave the Spartan Web Portal or mobile App, make a list of all of your new cameras' "Descriptions". Spartan images to not contain camera serial numbers in their metadata, so Animl uses the camera Descriptions as unique identifiers instead.

If you have not changed your cameras' Descriptions, they will be the cameras' unique IDs (often something like GL-MLTeb-231554). Those IDs are fine to use from Animl's perspective, but if you do change the Descriptions to something more human-readable, you'll need to use those updated Descriptions in place of the unique IDs as "serial numbers" when you register your camera with Animl.

If you are unsure whether you have changed the Description or what to use if not, send a test email to your personal email account. The emails' subject line template is "[date photo taken] - [camera description]". So if you don’t change the camera description, the email subject lines will look like something like “2025-01-31 14:35:00 – GL-MLTeb-231554”, and you can use the “GL-MLTeb-231554” part as the "serial number" when registering your camera with Animl.

If you did change the Description (e.g. to something like "Camera 2 East"), the subject line would be "2025-01-31 14:35:00 – Camera 2 East”, and you'd use “Camera 2 East” as the "serial number" when registering the camera with your Animl Project.

Arm the camera and take some test images

Follow Spartan's instructions for testing the camera. If everything is working correctly, you should see new images show up in both the Spartan web/mobile app and in your Animl Project.