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The Raspberry Pi is one of the most exciting developments in hobbyist computing today. Across the world, people are using it to automate beer making, open up the world of robotics and revolutionise STEM education in a world overrun by film students. These are all laudable pursuits. Meanwhile, what is Microsoft doing with it? Creating squirrel-hunting water robots.
Over at the firm's Machine Learning and Optimization group, a researcher saw squirrels stealing flower bulbs and seeds from his bird feeder. The research team trained a computer vision model to detect squirrels, and then put it onto a Raspberry Pi 3 board. Whenever an adventurous rodent happened by, it would turn on the sprinkler system.
Microsoft's sciurine aversions aren't the point of that story – its shoehorning of a convolutional neural network onto an ARM CPU is. It shows how organizations are pushing hardware further to support AI algorithms. As AI continues to make the headlines, researchers are pushing its capabilities to make it increasingly competent at basic tasks such as recognizing vision and speech.
Do you go with the cloud, GPUs, FPGAs, or other?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 24 2017, @03:26PM (8 children)
Sprinkler + motion detector combo is currently available, we tried one ~10 years ago and it was mildly effective in keeping suburban deer out of a flower garden. One source, http://www.ebay.com/bhp/scarecrow-sprinkler [ebay.com]
I'd recommend setting it up on a warm day, I got pretty wet in the course of adjusting the sensitivity... It had a pretty short battery life, now there are copies that have a solar cell on top which might reduce/eliminate battery usage.
If MS has really worked out how to ID specific critters, that might be worthwhile.
(Score: 4, Funny) by LoRdTAW on Monday July 24 2017, @03:52PM (2 children)
I find that M18 claymores are pretty good at permanently deterring all sorts of critters from the garden. Problem is you need to replant the damn garden AND explain yourself to the ATF after a deterrent incident. Maybe sprinklers are easier.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Monday July 24 2017, @04:03PM (1 child)
> Maybe sprinklers are easier.
They are, but nowhere near as satisfying. :-)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 25 2017, @04:28AM
BB-guns are fun with less mess, but you have to be home to target critters. If you automate them, you might shoot a pet or fire dept. member.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 24 2017, @04:42PM (2 children)
Stupid/soft-hearted neighbor feeds the deer in the winter. The herd back in the adjacent undeveloped area is at least a dozen, have seen that many at one time moving as a pack.
In the summer they feed on gardens & plantings. All that is needed is a deterrent, so that the deer eat other gardens, not mine...
In the fall they eat most of the apples that fall in the yard, which is useful because the apples are an old variety, not very tasty to humans.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday July 24 2017, @05:09PM (1 child)
You need a rifle and a big freezer not a deterrent.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 24 2017, @07:06PM
Ummm, no. No firearms. I did mention that there are neighbors. The only shooting that happens around here is cops and robbers (and photography). The cops sometimes practice on deer, using the euphemism, "bait and shoot".
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday July 24 2017, @05:56PM
Yes, Deer sprinklers and Rabbit Sprinklers are a thing. Even Amazon [amazon.com] carries them.
Difference is these wet down anything that moves.
You sort of don't want to chase the birds from the bird feeder, but everything else is fair game. Birds are not a particularly difficult thing to distinguish, and would be easier to teach a computer to recognize the bird than it would be to recognize a squirrel. Bird / Not Bird is easy.
The sensors available for the Raspberry PI are pretty amazing, and available from multiple sources:
https://www.dexterindustries.com/GrovePi/supported-sensors/ [dexterindustries.com]
https://www.adafruit.com/category/35 [adafruit.com]
Some of these can be made to operate in weird and serendipitous ways. My photographer friend uses the Grove Ultrasonic Ranger to differentiate between humming birds and other birds by wing beat frequency for photography purposes.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Monday July 24 2017, @06:39PM
Not bad. Seems to work against pigeons too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdYc86AA8M0 [youtube.com]
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