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Raspberry Pi for Kill Mosquitoes by Laser

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Re: Raspberry Pi for Kill Mosquitoes by Laser

#171

Post by uuidgen »

janoc wrote: post #67
helsinkiandrew wrote: post #12

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…

Good luck detecting a mosquito optically from a distance of several meters using a cheap camera and Raspberry Pi. Oh and you want to do from a moving drone. That will certainly make it work! Just look at the images in the article - the guy's best result was detecting a black speck appearing on a nearby white wall with some 60-70% reliability (based on his own numbers). So you would be missing a lot of mosquitoes - bu…

With a proper lens I think it just might work. You need to get huge focal length to make those pixels work. Then you need illumination because with those focal length it will be really dim. Then you need to scan the area because your FOV is tiny (but at least you'll get something like 90FPS @VGA res which is enough for AI) so you should be able to see those mosquitoes shining in the air like dust particles in sunlight coming from the window.

But then using a laser just insane - anything that has enough energy to down a mosquito will have enough energy to blind someone unfortunate to see the laser or its reflection. I'd go with power LED and some focusing with very narrow focal depth. maybe a lens moved like in optical drives, maybe a MEMS reflector like are used in projectors (but instead of spreading all pixels to cast a projection focusing it in a single point?

Re: Raspberry Pi for Kill Mosquitoes by Laser

#172

Post by agravier »

walrus01 wrote: post #145
janoc wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck detecting a mosquito optically from a distance of several meters using a cheap camera and Raspberry Pi. Oh and you want to do from a moving drone. That will certainly make it work! Just look at the images in the article - the guy's best result was detecting a black speck appearing on a nearby white wall with some 60-70% reliability (based on his own numbers). So you would be missing a lot of mosquitoes - bu…

> using a cheap camera even if you had a RED Komodo feeding uncompressed 4K DCI 60fps video to a pci-express bus capture card, the sensor resolution and tiny size of mosquitoes means that unless the lighting conditions are just right, and the mosquito is somehow highlighted against a background, it's going to be very hard to pick them out at distances of 2 or more meters. and that's before you get into the software p…

A LIDAR is not the right solution. A LIDAR misses most of the space a few meters away, and even if by chance the beam passes right over a mosquito, it will be filtered out by the built-in denoising algorithms.

Re: Raspberry Pi for Kill Mosquitoes by Laser

#173

Post by jfroma »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #81
maxerickson wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you try a fly trap jar yet? You hang it out behind a shed or garage, the lid has a little maze that they crawl into and then they can't find their way out. My parents always used https://www.bigstinkyflytrap.com/ . It definitely caught a lot of flies, which can be different than catching enough flies of course.

We had a small but persistent issue with flies hanging out by our garbage cans so I purchased one of these fly traps with bait. It worked far too well. Within a day it had attracted flies from a large surrounding area. The nearly filled jar of flies had a presence I can only describe as "Stephen King-esque" just buzzing with raw malevolence. If you think one large black fly can make quite the noise I invite you to li…

I had the exact same experience it was absolutely disgusting. I attracted all flies from the neighborhood.

I also tried once with an insecticide which also contained a bait, it came in granules and you had to mix with water and spray all over. The floor of my outdoors where full of dead flies.

Best advice I can give: never use any kind of bait. That’s completely BS, you are never going to kill them all. You want flies to go to another place, keep things clean.

Flies hate wind, use fans.

Re: Raspberry Pi for Kill Mosquitoes by Laser

#174

Post by iudqnolq »

uuidgen wrote: post #171
janoc wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck detecting a mosquito optically from a distance of several meters using a cheap camera and Raspberry Pi. Oh and you want to do from a moving drone. That will certainly make it work! Just look at the images in the article - the guy's best result was detecting a black speck appearing on a nearby white wall with some 60-70% reliability (based on his own numbers). So you would be missing a lot of mosquitoes - bu…

With a proper lens I think it just might work. You need to get huge focal length to make those pixels work. Then you need illumination because with those focal length it will be really dim. Then you need to scan the area because your FOV is tiny (but at least you'll get something like 90FPS @VGA res which is enough for AI) so you should be able to see those mosquitoes shining in the air like dust particles in sunligh…

> But then using a laser just insane ... I'd go with power LED and some focusing with very narrow focal depth. maybe a lens moved like in optical drives, maybe a MEMS reflector like are used in projectors (but instead of spreading all pixels to cast a projection focusing it in a single point?

haven't you just described how to make a laser?

Re: Raspberry Pi for Kill Mosquitoes by Laser

#175

Post by antonvs »

onion2k wrote: post #151
Covzire wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shrug, add a nice zoom lens to make it's effective range several meters instead. Of course it would be far sighted but maybe you know most mosquitos will be several meters away anyway. Or have 3 cameras, one for the cm, one for the m and one able to zoom many meters to look at known problem spots like puddles or a bird bath.

An alternative solution would be to genetically engineer bigger mosquitoes. This is why I should not be in charge of anything.

Be sure to include some laser-resistant capabilities in the engineered mosquitoes, so that consumers will be forced to buy upgrades to more powerful lasers.

Re: Raspberry Pi for Kill Mosquitoes by Laser

#176

Post by rowanG077 »

iudqnolq wrote: post #174
uuidgen wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With a proper lens I think it just might work. You need to get huge focal length to make those pixels work. Then you need illumination because with those focal length it will be really dim. Then you need to scan the area because your FOV is tiny (but at least you'll get something like 90FPS @VGA res which is enough for AI) so you should be able to see those mosquitoes shining in the air like dust particles in sunligh…

> But then using a laser just insane ... I'd go with power LED and some focusing with very narrow focal depth. maybe a lens moved like in optical drives, maybe a MEMS reflector like are used in projectors (but instead of spreading all pixels to cast a projection focusing it in a single point? haven't you just described how to make a laser?

No a laser is coherent. It has almost the same intensity in it's entire path. If you know the approximate distance you can accurately focus a normal beam of Light into that area. Killing the bug but much safer.

Re: Raspberry Pi for Kill Mosquitoes by Laser

#177

Post by iudqnolq »

rowanG077 wrote: post #176
iudqnolq wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But then using a laser just insane ... I'd go with power LED and some focusing with very narrow focal depth. maybe a lens moved like in optical drives, maybe a MEMS reflector like are used in projectors (but instead of spreading all pixels to cast a projection focusing it in a single point? haven't you just described how to make a laser?

No a laser is coherent. It has almost the same intensity in it's entire path. If you know the approximate distance you can accurately focus a normal beam of Light into that area. Killing the bug but much safer.

Thanks for teaching me something

Re: Raspberry Pi for Kill Mosquitoes by Laser

#178

Post by LeifCarrotson »

uuidgen wrote: post #171
janoc wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck detecting a mosquito optically from a distance of several meters using a cheap camera and Raspberry Pi. Oh and you want to do from a moving drone. That will certainly make it work! Just look at the images in the article - the guy's best result was detecting a black speck appearing on a nearby white wall with some 60-70% reliability (based on his own numbers). So you would be missing a lot of mosquitoes - bu…

With a proper lens I think it just might work. You need to get huge focal length to make those pixels work. Then you need illumination because with those focal length it will be really dim. Then you need to scan the area because your FOV is tiny (but at least you'll get something like 90FPS @VGA res which is enough for AI) so you should be able to see those mosquitoes shining in the air like dust particles in sunligh…

I've integrated a few laser engravers and laser-cutting CNCs, so let me clear up a couple misconceptions: Lasers typically have a narrow focal length, just like your LED proposal - otherwise they'd damage the optics/mirrors! They're designed to pass a coherent beam of about 10mm diameter through a series of lenses and mirrors. The beam of an engraver might carry 10W of power in that diameter, which is pretty bright, but decent lenses or mirrors with high transmission and reflection won't be damaged. It's safe for both skin and optics until, say, 100mm after it goes through the primary lens. Hopefully at the surface of the thing you're cutting or engraving, it's a spot size of 0.1mm! With 10W of power in that tiny area, even exotic antireflective glass that can transmit 99% of the light will be atomized.

If the thing you're cutting/engraving isn't present, then 100mm past the focal plane, it's back to 10mm diameter, and 100mm after that, it's 20mm, and just continues dissipating. It's really pretty hard to focus it back into a coherent beam sufficiently narrow to damage eyesight (much less skin).

Yes, the CDRH is really concerned about the possibility of a laser system accidentally lasing a blob of metal into a perfect mirror that will send a coherent beam directly into the eye of an operator standing meters away; I've got laser systems with thousands of hours on them etching reflective foil off of plastic and there's no sign of reflections causing damage to the smoked acrylic that's shrouding the operation.

The typical mechanism used to drive laser engravers is more like a HDD actuator that moves the read/write heads - it's called a galvanometer. Basically a mirror on a stick connected to a magnet. A voice coil pulls the magnet +/- 10 degrees or so; They've got sub-millisecond response times so hitting a moving mosquito would be no problem!

I propose that you suck the mosquitoes through an enclosure with something like a box fan or duct booster. Make sure the entrance and exit has to go through a couple right angles so your laser optics are never visible to someone outside the box. Backlight the inside of the box so that instead of AI to see whether the thing in your camera FOV is a mosquito or a songbird really far away, you just zap any black mosquito-sized blobs that pass through.

Re: Raspberry Pi for Kill Mosquitoes by Laser

#179

Post by jonplackett »

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #12

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…

Maybe you could detect them with a bunch of microphones and measure the time difference between sound arrival time.

Or at least that could tell a camera where to look.

Re: Raspberry Pi for Kill Mosquitoes by Laser

#180

Post by macintux »

onion2k wrote: post #151
Covzire wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shrug, add a nice zoom lens to make it's effective range several meters instead. Of course it would be far sighted but maybe you know most mosquitos will be several meters away anyway. Or have 3 cameras, one for the cm, one for the m and one able to zoom many meters to look at known problem spots like puddles or a bird bath.

An alternative solution would be to genetically engineer bigger mosquitoes. This is why I should not be in charge of anything.

I'm sure there's an XKCD similar in spirit to your idea; if not, there should be.
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