Squirrel Stopper

Squirrels pose a serious threat to hobbyst gardeners just interested in keeping a couple vegatables alive. Squirrel Stopper is the non-violent, plant safe solution to your garden protection needs.

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Inspiration

Protect With Peace Squirrel Stopper utilizes natural Pavlovian behavioral patterns to train local rodents that your plants are not their snacks!

What it does

Basic Motion Detection Software Squirrel Stopper utilizes a very rudimentary system to detect movement within your garden. Thus triggering a noise making unit to scare away potential pests, or de incentive that ripe tomato at the very least.

How we built it

Caffinee Squirrel Stopper was built in one night, and currently uses a basic low resolution laptop webcam to monitor movement and send data to a micro controller connected to our noisemaker.

Challenges we ran into

Driving Me NUTS Having never worked with images, or the opencv library before, the learning curb was quite steep. However overcoming the initial hurdles, we were able to implement a basic algorithm to detect changes between image frames. Additionally having never worked with an Arduino added to the challenge.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We Made Our First Project Having never been a part of a Hackathon before, or building an embedded system project, we are quite proud of the simple accomplishments that we had in terms of developing an idea from concept to reality.

What we learned

Can't Even Count We learned a ton about basic embedded systems, python, and the iterative design process as a whole. Through work shops, hands on activities, and Squirrel Stopper, the knowledge gained from this past weekend was immeasurable.

What's next for Squirrel Stopper

Straight to Market! jk. There is a lot that needs to be improved about Squirrel Stopper. First the motion detection algorithm is incredibly basic, and easy to trigger. Instead implementing a smarter, AI or ML based solution could help us greatly increase accuracy, and allow distinction between friend and foe. Additional features could be added to further increase Squirrel Stoppers usefulness in the garden. Overall the concept could use some far better code and implementation.

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