[zwieback]

My goal: build an outdoor robot to keep the deer away from my plants. Learning goals:

- Brushless motor control: has now reached cheap commodity status and would be good to learn more about. In the past I was always stuck between DC toy motors and full 6 wire AC motor control.

- Vision system on a small micro with edge-AI model for deer detection. After decades of classic machine vision I think it's time to overcome my neural net reservations and plunge in with one of those microcontrollers that can run pre-trained models efficiently

- Battery charging dock that robot drives to autonomously: learning goal is Oregon weather capable contacts or even wireless charging

My instinct would be to do all this in C++ with some Python as high-level glue but maybe time to learn some Rust? Not sure yet.

[trevorhlynn]

There is a similar project for rabbit deterrence that might give some helpful ideas on the approach: https://blog.roboflow.com/rabbit-deterrence-system/

[zwieback]

Awesome, thanks for the link! The vision portion is very much what I'm imagining for my deer deterrent.

[EForEndeavour]

This sounds like an amazing project and learning opportunity! Reminds me of a halfbaked hardware+software project idea of my own:

- Goal: increase the amount of natural light in my apartment during the day

- Mount a flat mirror on a motorized sun-tracking attachment on south-facing balcony railing

- Set up geometry, software, and motor to rotate the mirror so that it always reflects a beam of sunlight into the apartment, trained on a target area between the wall and ceiling, above eye level of occupants

[zwieback]

Cool idea, there is a town in Austria where the sun doesn't shine in winter and they were going to build something like that on the adjacent mountaintop. I think it never happened, though.

[eitland]

It is done in Norway: https://www.visitnorway.com/listings/the-giant-sun-mirrors-i...

More results here: https://kagi.com/search?q=rjukan+mirror&r=no&sh=jDluj1x6n_J8...

[larubbio]

An Italian town did build a mirror to do that.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/epnvzn/viganella-italy-fake-...

[edit] Looks like a town in Norway did it as well, and theirs tracks the sun.

https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2013/10/using-giant-mirror...

[madphilosopher]

If you focus multiple mirrors on a single spot, you can set things on fire. Depending on one's application, this is a feature, not a bug!

[larubbio]

I love this goal, best of luck with it. I would like to build (or buy) a robot to protect my chickens from air and ground predators during the day so they can happily free range all day.

[zwieback]

I feel ya, lost many chickens to raccoons, hawks and even a dog once.