Raspberry Pi for Kill Mosquitoes by Laser • Hacker News Board

Re: Raspberry Pi for Kill Mosquitoes by Laser

#221

Post by vagrantJin » Mon, Mar 08, 2021, 6:50 AM UTC

mleonhard wrote: post #214

This is important work. An effective non-toxic indoor mosquito control device will eliminate much suffering and death. Malaria prevents Africa from developing to middle-class societies with stable populations and functioning governments that are able to control environmental pollution. Therefore malaria indirectly affects all humans. I think an effective indoor mosquito control system will detect mosquitos with micro…

> middle-class societies with stable populations and functioning governments that are able to control environmental pollution

I'm not entirely sure if this is sarcastic trolling or an actual belief of a sane individual but this, this is a load of garbage.

So what, if Malaria gets solved the whole continent will suddenly have functioning governments and economies? Do you know how big the continent is? It's history?

I hope you were trolling.

Re: Raspberry Pi for Kill Mosquitoes by Laser

#222

Post by chrismorgan » Mon, Mar 08, 2021, 6:50 AM UTC

markvdb wrote: post #40

What about a triple beam setup? The individual beams would be only half or a third as powerful, making them safer to human eyes. Only where they cross they would carry enough power to zap the mosquito...

In Australia a laser that emits more than one milliwatt is a prohibited weapon. Your three 333 mW lasers are still vastly over this legal limit.

(And Australia’s laws here were decided based on safety standards, the figures of which uuidgen points out.)

Re: Raspberry Pi for Kill Mosquitoes by Laser

#223

Post by karlerss » Mon, Mar 08, 2021, 7:13 AM UTC

I was hiking with a friend in northern europe. It was +25C and we were being harassed by mosquitoes, horseflies and who knows what else. Naturally the same idea occurred to us - to use a head mounted laser to fry the wings of anything that approaches us. We were joking about the bulkiness - that you would have a power hungry i7 on your head, doing live object detection, a heavy power supply for computation and a strong laser, servo motors whirring directing the laser. It sounds unjust - the forest being their home and couple of city-dwellers killing the creatures for a bit of convenience.

Re: Raspberry Pi for Kill Mosquitoes by Laser

#224

Post by evolve2k » Mon, Mar 08, 2021, 7:25 AM UTC

“The developed prototype in this paper has a limited range of actions. But at the same time, the results of this work proved the possibility of using lasers to destroy mosquitoes. In the future, to increase the damaging ability, it is necessary to increase the accuracy of the laser operation. To implement tracking in the Python language, various algorithms were written, both with tracking at each moment of only one mosquito and using the multithreading function and transmitting data on the position of mosquitoes using an array to the galvanometer. The success of the experiment can be enhanced by using a more powerful laser, which will make it possible to neutralize more than 2 mosquitoes in one second.”

Re: Raspberry Pi for Kill Mosquitoes by Laser

#225

Post by hinkley » Mon, Mar 08, 2021, 7:51 AM UTC

kumarvvr wrote: post #59

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…

One solution would be to lure mosquitos to a container or location and then zap them.

Honeypot those little buggers.

Re: Raspberry Pi for Kill Mosquitoes by Laser

#226

Post by jacquesm » Mon, Mar 08, 2021, 8:00 AM UTC

bigiain wrote: post #199

jacquesm wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guilty as charged.

So??? How well/badly dd it work? Where's the blog post? :-)

I didn't think it worthy of a write up. The ML part that made it a bit more interesting was to keep the bees alive but to get the wasps (I'm allergic to wasps), and I couldn't get it to reliably differentiate between the two so it never hit 'production'.

Re: Raspberry Pi for Kill Mosquitoes by Laser

#227

Post by MayeulC » Mon, Mar 08, 2021, 8:30 AM UTC

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…

Yeah, this doesn't really scale.

For safety, I think using multiple coordinated laser sources would be better (making them all converge at a single point). That, plus obviously a wavelength not dangerous for our eyesight.

Angular precision is an issue, but one could probably go around it by using a closed-loop control system that targets before increasing the power.

Targeting is hard as well, if you want a reliable system, there's probably no alternative to sensor fusion (sound, active infrared range-meter, maybe radar & ultrasound).

In the end, it's probably overkill compared to a trap, but the challenges are interesting.

Re: Raspberry Pi for Kill Mosquitoes by Laser

#228

Post by benhurmarcel » Mon, Mar 08, 2021, 8:51 AM UTC

ziptrees wrote: post #43

I just moved to a property near a pond that is severely infested with midge flies and mosquitos. The water is supposed to be treated by the HOA but they've neglected it for a while I guess. A solution like this wouldn't work due to the sheer volume of insects in the air at any given time (millions gathering around my block). I rigged up a door reed switch that turns on high power fans for 30 seconds when opened that…

Look up propane mosquito traps.

Re: Raspberry Pi for Kill Mosquitoes by Laser

#229

Post by est » Mon, Mar 08, 2021, 9:01 AM UTC

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…

> This article is BS

Not completely BS for me. I have actually learned something:

> The size of a mosquito can vary from 1 mm to 5 mm, this is the main criterion for the method of detection and retrieval of mosquito coordinates. When monitoring the position of the mosquito with ultrasound, it is necessary to use several sensors in different places and processing their information to calculate the location, which theoretically is suitable only for detecting one mosquito, but if there are several mosquitoes, the device will not work correctly. The temperature of the body of a mosquito due to its cold blood is like the temperature of the environment. With a very high resolution of the thermal imager, the mosquito temperature will differ insignificantly against the background - on the order of 0.1 C. The use of sonar has several difficulties when working in open areas where it is necessary to use sonar with a narrow beam and a narrow radiation pattern.

tl;dr, ultrasonic/infra-red/sonar don't work either.

Re: Raspberry Pi for Kill Mosquitoes by Laser

#230

Post by ColinWright » Mon, Mar 08, 2021, 9:04 AM UTC

xbar wrote: post #181

ColinWright wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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 commenda…

I like the author, the idea and the article. It will not stop me from highlighting one of my favorite clauses: "there are hundreds of different creams, devices, and other devices. "

It has the feel of being machine translated. A short time ago I saw an example of three different verbs in one language being translated into the same verb in English ... I'll see if I can find it. I suspect in the author's first language the first "devices" was something specific that got a generic label in English.