How it works
Four things happen between an animal arriving and you reading about it
Here they are in order, with nothing left out. The whole point of the design is that the first three happen on your land, by themselves, whether or not there is a signal.
Step 1 · The sensor
The sensor notices
The Wildet sensor is a small battery-powered post you place where animals come onto the land — a gap in a hedge, a woodland edge, the low corner of a green. It has motion detectors facing every direction and spends almost all of its time asleep.
When something moves, it wakes, sends one short radio message to the controller, and goes back to sleep. The radio is LoRa, a long-range, low-power link that needs no mobile coverage and no wiring between the sensor and the controller.
There is no camera in the sensor. It knows that something moved, and nothing else.
Step 2 · The controller
The controller decides, on the spot
The controller is a weatherproof box on 12 V power — mains, a leisure battery, or a solar setup — with its own backup battery. It receives the sensor's message and, within a second, does three things:
- Checks the message really came from one of your sensors and is not a repeat.
- Checks your rules: how long to wait after the last activation, how many activations a day you will allow, and how long the deterrent may run.
- If the rules allow it, switches the deterrent on.
All of this happens inside the controller. It does not ask a server for permission, so a dead spot, a network outage or a slow night makes no difference to whether the deterrent fires.
Step 3 · The deterrent
The deterrent fires — briefly
A deterrent is anything on your land, powered by the controller, that an animal does not want to stay near: a siren, a bright light, a sudden movement. The controller has six switched 12 V outputs, so it can drive equipment you already have as well as what we supply.
Every activation is short and every day has a cap. That is not a limitation we apologise for; it is how deterrence keeps working. Animals get used to anything that is loud and predictable. A deterrent that goes off only when something is actually there, for a few seconds, and then stops, stays surprising for much longer.
What a deterrent is not
- It is not a fence. Nothing physical stops the animal; it chooses to leave.
- It is not a trap and it does not injure. It startles.
- It is not a timer. Equipment that fires on a schedule teaches animals the schedule; Wildet fires on presence.
- It is not surveillance. No pictures are taken and no people are identified.
Step 4 · The report
It tells you what happened
The controller checks in over the mobile network every few minutes, and straight away after anything important — a sensor firing, a deterrent running, a low battery. It uses a low-bandwidth mobile standard made for small devices, which sips power and works in places a phone struggles.
If there is no coverage at the moment, it keeps the events and sends them when there is. Nothing is lost, and nothing waits on the report to happen in the first place.
In the app, an activation looks like this:
DETERRENT FIRED · 03:12 · Sensor 2 · siren, 8 s
Always a word and a time, never just a colour. From the same app you change the rules, and the controller picks the new ones up at its next check-in.
What works without a signal
Most of it. This is the honest split.
Works with no mobile coverage at all
- Sensing movement
- Deciding whether to react
- Firing the deterrent
- Enforcing your cooldown and daily cap
- Remembering every event until it can be sent
Needs coverage, at least now and then
- Seeing events in the app
- Changing the rules from your phone
- Being told about a low battery or a fault
What installing it involves
We look at the land with you — where the animals come in, where there is power, where a controller can sit within radio range of the sensors — and agree on a layout. Sensors go on posts at the entry points. The controller goes near power and near the deterrent. Then the rules are set for your species and season, and the first night tells you whether the siting is right.
The number of sensors and controllers, and therefore the cost, follows the size and shape of the ground. That is why there is no price table: while we learn what it should cost, we are agreeing it with a small group of early testers, site by site.