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Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
Depending on which hemisphere of the Earth you're currently reading this from, summer is finally starting to fight its way to the surface. For the more "green" of our readers, that can mean it's time to start making plans for summer gardening. But as anyone who's ever planted something edible can tell you, garden pests such as squirrels are fantastically effective at turning all your hard work into a wasteland. Finding ways to keep them away from your crops can be a full-time job, but luckily it's a job nobody will mind if automation steals from humans.
[Peter Quinn] writes in to tell us about the elaborate lengths he is going to keep bushy-tailed marauders away from his tomatoes this year. Long term he plans on setting up a non-lethal sentry gun to scare them away, but before he can get to that point he needs to perfect the science of automatically targeting his prey. At the same time, he wants to train the system well enough that it won't fire on humans or other animals such as cats and birds which might visit his garden.
Source: https://hackaday.com/2018/04/30/training-the-squirrel-terminator/
(Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday May 02 2018, @05:54PM
If you are going to be building Sentry guns they should at least look like the once from Aliens. It's that or none at all really. I wonder what PETA thinks of this, not that I normally give a shit of what they think. But this seems like something they could get up in arms over. Won't someone think of the poor squirrel and their nuts.
Shouldn't it be fairly simple to prevent it from shooting at humans and cats and dogs? Squirrels are small, cats/dogs/humans are large. If the target box is "large" at range X then don't fire, if it's small then fire at will. Problem might be that instead of caring for the plants he might spend an awful lot of times picking up pellets and refilling the magazines every damn day. Perhaps he could use some kind of eco-friendly pellets or something that are just degradable. No point in using steel balls or anything like that. Question is if they are actually even hitting the squirrels (and other rodents) or not, it might be enough with some near misses to scare them off. Might be possible to just fire a squirt of water or something at them to, just having something impact near them is probably enough to get them to run the heck away at full speed.
I guess if one really gets the target zeroed in and the velocity is high enough you could shot small steel balls and you could be eating squirrel (or rat or ...) every day!