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[unicornduke]

 I had a breakthrough for the laser scarecrow project. Everyone involved has been fighting with the problem of spinning the laser and also making it go up and down while not completely murdering the wiring. PVC pipes, gears, stepper motors, all this jazz we've been trying. 

I was laying in bed sunday night and I thought, someone has wanted to spin something and also tilt it. And it turns out that there are a bunch of people out there attaching cameras to drones and taking footage and they have things that are pan and tilt mechanisms so they can remotely control or program cameras to take footage. That pan on the horizontal and tilt. So I solved every issue because the servos run the mechanisms entirely, so no other motors needed, and the wiring runs from the servos through the base and I can attach them right into the motor shield/arduino board instead of having the stepper motor run the pan and all the associated fiddling with that. 

I ordered a 360 pan model for this and it was only 60 dollars. Fingers crossed that it works the way I'm hoping because then I can set up a laser scarecrow for like, maybe $150 or $200? That way I could build a couple really easily and cheap and keep one for my own grain production. 

I'm not sure on the lasers though. The one used for the official project is a green one inch diameter laser that is out of stock. So I don't know if I should buy one around the same size or just do two small ones or what. I've got one itty bitty one right now. The biggest issue is that 99% of lasers ship from China and that's going to take too long for my liking. Adafruit has tiny ones and they ship to me within a day. So maybe I just buy like four and attach all those in slightly different directions. That'll scare the birds. 

Comments

[dorchadas]

I just want to say I love the idea of laser scarecrows. Though, how does it detect the birds?

[unicornduke]

Oh, it doesn't need to! Birds fly starting around dawn so it will have a light sensor to turn it on when it gets light enough. It's a pretty low power system, it's pretty much a small laser, two small circuit boards and two small servos and it will run on a marine deep cycle battery, which should give it power for a couple of weeks. That will get us through blueberry season when the bird pressure is high. We could get really wild and hook a solar charger up and recharge the battery.

[dorchadas]

Huh! How are the birds scared by the lasers, then? Are there multiple lasers that cover a wide area and the idea is that they'll fly into at least one of them? Or do they move in random patterns and just rely on the bird being in their path?

[unicornduke]

The lasers move randomly, both on the horizontal and tilting up and down and I would say it's decently fast maybe rotating fully around every five or seven seconds. They are mounted on poles, ten to fifteen feet up so they are above the tops of whatever crop you are trying to protect so it keeps the birds from entering the field. Apparently they think the laser is solid. They also use laser diodes, which are not the same thing as laser pointers, the diodes are much stronger.

There are commercial laser scarecrows that cost between $5000 and $10000. This is a DIY thing based on the University of Rhode Island research done by Dr. Rebecca Brown to make one for less than $500. There's a lot we still don't know, how far it will cover, will it need more lasers, how effective is it on slopes, does it work on all bird species. So this one is for my parents for their blueberries.