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Raspberry Pi for Kill Mosquitoes by Laser

preprints.org

21–30 of 262 posts

Re: Raspberry Pi for Kill Mosquitoes by Laser

#22
post #3

> More than 700 thousand human deaths I don’t think I’ve ever in my 40 and nine years on the planet seen numbers of this scale written in mixed numeric and textual form. It’s not like 700 kilometers, where you could at least argue this is the case vs the SI unit, but where a kilometer is a useful unit for communication anyway. The natural unit here is a human life, not a thousand human lives. There are a several othe…

>> More than 700 thousand human deaths

> I don’t think I’ve ever in my 40 and nine years on the planet seen numbers of this scale written in mixed numeric and textual form.

In my 50 and nine years on this planet, I have.

> There are a several other quality issues in the abstract ...

It's a pre-print, and the author's first language is not English. Some people struggle with a second language, and I think it's commendable that someone is willing to make their results available.

Re: Raspberry Pi for Kill Mosquitoes by Laser

#24

This work (I think) worked with the mosquitos 30cm away with a servo scanning Pi Camera (1080p) and a 1W laser. To work in the real world - cover a whole room or terrace - presumably a much higher resolution camera (or much faster scanning system) would be required. Even a 1W laser is dangerous to eyesight, if it was being fired at targets mingling with people. The system could be mounted on small drones that would p…

I can think of an alternative, not sure whether that would be practical, but it's possibly safer than laser: instead of shooting laser, make a turret that shoots (biodegradable, edible) soap water at the mosquitoes, in the smallest dose necessary to make the mosquito's wings stick. It would require some fluid-aerodynamics and projectile motion calculation, however.

Re: Raspberry Pi for Kill Mosquitoes by Laser

#25
post #18

Why not use sonar like the other such project which if memory serves is backed by Bill Gates.

The system designed and built by Intellectual Ventures uses lasers for ranging and discrimination.

https://photonicsentry.com/

https://www.wired.com/2010/02/death-star-laser-zaps-mosqitoe...

Re: Raspberry Pi for Kill Mosquitoes by Laser

#26

This work (I think) worked with the mosquitos 30cm away with a servo scanning Pi Camera (1080p) and a 1W laser. To work in the real world - cover a whole room or terrace - presumably a much higher resolution camera (or much faster scanning system) would be required. Even a 1W laser is dangerous to eyesight, if it was being fired at targets mingling with people. The system could be mounted on small drones that would p…

I share your concern, but mosquitoes do currently kill an awful lot of people.

Re: Raspberry Pi for Kill Mosquitoes by Laser

#27
post #24

This work (I think) worked with the mosquitos 30cm away with a servo scanning Pi Camera (1080p) and a 1W laser. To work in the real world - cover a whole room or terrace - presumably a much higher resolution camera (or much faster scanning system) would be required. Even a 1W laser is dangerous to eyesight, if it was being fired at targets mingling with people. The system could be mounted on small drones that would p…

I can think of an alternative, not sure whether that would be practical, but it's possibly safer than laser: instead of shooting laser, make a turret that shoots (biodegradable, edible) soap water at the mosquitoes, in the smallest dose necessary to make the mosquito's wings stick. It would require some fluid-aerodynamics and projectile motion calculation, however.

Use a garden hose, cover the whole area

Re: Raspberry Pi for Kill Mosquitoes by Laser

#28
post #3

> More than 700 thousand human deaths I don’t think I’ve ever in my 40 and nine years on the planet seen numbers of this scale written in mixed numeric and textual form. It’s not like 700 kilometers, where you could at least argue this is the case vs the SI unit, but where a kilometer is a useful unit for communication anyway. The natural unit here is a human life, not a thousand human lives. There are a several othe…

Writing numbers that way is common in various languages. For example, every day on the Polish news the number of newly detected COVID cases is written in the format "13 tys. 574", where "tys." is the abbreviation for “thousand”.

As native-English-speaking academics have become a minority of those publishing in international journals (and fewer journals are doing serious copyediting anyway), there seems to be more and more toleration in science of different ways of writing things based on the author’s own native language.

Re: Raspberry Pi for Kill Mosquitoes by Laser

#29
post #24

This work (I think) worked with the mosquitos 30cm away with a servo scanning Pi Camera (1080p) and a 1W laser. To work in the real world - cover a whole room or terrace - presumably a much higher resolution camera (or much faster scanning system) would be required. Even a 1W laser is dangerous to eyesight, if it was being fired at targets mingling with people. The system could be mounted on small drones that would p…

I can think of an alternative, not sure whether that would be practical, but it's possibly safer than laser: instead of shooting laser, make a turret that shoots (biodegradable, edible) soap water at the mosquitoes, in the smallest dose necessary to make the mosquito's wings stick. It would require some fluid-aerodynamics and projectile motion calculation, however.

not a bad idea… something manually controlled but otherwise similar already exists, the "bug-a-salt" gun. https://www.bugasalt.com
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