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Raspberry Pi for Kill Mosquitoes by Laser

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131–140 of 262 posts

Re: Raspberry Pi for Kill Mosquitoes by Laser

#131
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…

Yes, at 300mm range, it's just a toy, and mounting a 1W laser with a targeting system on a drone is a terrible idea. I can see ways to make this work, though. You need a good way to tell that you're on target. The way to do that is to use the vision system only as a search radar, to find that there's something to shoot at and approximately where it is. Then point the laser near the target, at low power, and start sca…

> An ordinary UV lamp with bug zapper will probably be more effective.

Alas, as I discovered recently when looking at those nifty, cheap, USB-powered UV + fan mosquito killers -- mosquitoes aren't attracted to UV.

Evidently they are attracted to CO2 and warmth, which are a bit harder to generate at 5V, sadly.

Re: Raspberry Pi for Kill Mosquitoes by Laser

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The FAA might take objection too. Some places won't let you have lasers within a certain range of an airport. Also, what happens if the mosquito turret mistakes a 747 for a mosquito? Sounds like an effective way to blind pilots. Cool idea though, might be fun indoors if your house is fireproofed.

I thought this was for indoors, outdoors mosquito is food for other animals. Also gotta be a sick 747 flying upside down.

The Boeing 707 famously did a barrel roll on its first public flight.

Re: Raspberry Pi for Kill Mosquitoes by Laser

#133
post #67

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…

[deleted]

Re: Raspberry Pi for Kill Mosquitoes by Laser

#134

Incidentally, this was first posted to a clone of HN that I run. I can't link it here, or in fact even mention the name. But if you go to my Twitter profile, it's my pinned tweet. So if you like reading this sort of thing, perhaps you'd also like seeing it 44 days before it premiers on HN. It was certainly one of the more interesting submissions. It was kind of funny, because the author posted it a bunch of times. I…

You can't post if because... it has happened before, and caused trouble? Curious to hear why you're running a clone of HN, and why you assert that some cool stuff shows up there before it does on HN.

I don't know why it cannot be shared here. Given the open source nature of PG's Arc and the fact that it's main repo comes with a HN clone, I'd be surprised if there was an impetus not to share forks of HN on here.

But maybe the hesitancy to link the site has more to do with this statement on it's Welcome page:

The initial impetus behind the site is a desire to try to recapture the early spirit of Hacker News. HN currently has about 5 million visitors a month. It's different than it was back in the day when it was a much smaller group of people.

Re: Raspberry Pi for Kill Mosquitoes by Laser

#136
post #98

There is actually a commercial product for killing lice on farmed salmon with lasers ( https://www.stingray.no/delousing-with-laser/?lang=en ), but I have to admit that I don't know how well it works. So at least there are related products. Probably easier to solve the lice on salmon problem though.

This effectiveness of product has been debunked half a year ago [1], though the technology is very interesting.

[1]: Bui, S., Geitung, L., Oppedal, F., & Barrett, L. T. (2020). Salmon lice survive the straight shooter: A commercial scale sea cage trial of laser delousing. Preventive Veterinary Medicine, 181, 105063. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.prevetmed.2020.105063

Re: Raspberry Pi for Kill Mosquitoes by Laser

#137

Nathan Myhrvold (of Microsoft fame) tried to build a laser to kill mosquitoes, ~11-12 years ago. He even gave a TED talk about it [0]. It seems that the project eventually failed to achieve anything of sufficient value. [1] [0]: https://www.ted.com/talks/nathan_myhrvold_could_this_laser_z... [1]: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/laser-shooting-mosqu...

> (of Microsoft fame)

I believe by now he's more famous for being the world's most damaging patent troll

Re: Raspberry Pi for Kill Mosquitoes by Laser

#138
post #130

If you do have to kill something then at least do it humanely. Burning them to death is pretty horrible, so is zapping them with a high voltage shock.

I think most people don't believe insects are complex of mind to be said to suffer in the same sense as human beings. Even if this is not so what is the exchange rate between human suffering and mosquito suffering? I would probably horribly torture any number of mosquitos to prevent the suffering of even one human. Wouldn't you? Can you imagine telling one person sorry you need to die I cannot justify torturing so many mosquitos?

Re: Raspberry Pi for Kill Mosquitoes by Laser

#139
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...

A 300mW beam is far more than enough to ruin your eyes.

Re: Raspberry Pi for Kill Mosquitoes by Laser

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Protected against weather and sunlights but not against dumb kids with eBay lasers yet

Then why don't terrorists and angry people use this?

Because there had never been actual deaths to it?
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