One of many troublesome issues about elevating chickens is that you simply aren’t the one factor that finds them tasty. Foxes, raccoons, hawks — if it might eat meat, it in all probability desires a chew of your flock. [donutsorelse] wished to guard his flock and to have the ability to know when predators have been about with out staying up all night time subsequent to the hen-house. What to do however outsource the position of Hen Guardian to a Raspberry pi?
Object detection is finished utilizing a YOLOv8 mannequin educated on pictures of the varied predators native to [donutorelse]. The mannequin is working on a Raspberry Pi and getting pictures from a normal webcam. For the reason that webcam has no low-light functionality, the system additionally has a motion-activated mild that’s arguably goes a good distance in the direction of spooking predators away itself. To assist with the spooking, a speaker module performs particular sound recordsdata for every detected predator — presumably completely different sounds would possibly work higher at scaring off completely different predators.
If that doesn’t work, the system telephones dwelling to activate a siren inside [donutorelse]’s home, utilizing a Blues Wi-fi Notecarrier F as a mobile USB modem. The siren is only a dumb unit; activation is dealt with by way of a TP-Hyperlink sensible plug that’s hooked into [donutorelse]’s customized sensible dwelling setup. Presumably the siren cues [donutorelse] to take motion in opposition to the predator assault on the chickens.
Weirdly sufficient, this isn’t the primary time we’ve seen an AI-enabled rooster coop, however it’s the first one to make into our ongoing problem, which by the way wraps up immediately.
