Senior Design 04-05: Team 1
Many residential areas border
forests and woods which are home to many different sorts of animals. Often,
people who live in these areas have gardens, which have plants that the
animals like to eat, destroying the garden. Many different solutions have
been suggested for this problem, from sprays on the plants to visible
deterrents to audible warnings. However, these solutions do not always
work, or have other problems attached such as disturbing the neighborhood
with unwanted noise. Therefore, a new solution is needed, which is what
our team is developing and outlining in this report.
Our objective in this
project is to develop an automatic deterrent system to help protect gardens
and such from animals that would eat them. The design shall use a motion
tracking device to determine when an animal has entered into the protected
area, be able to activate a deterrent to scare the animal away, and sense
when it has left the area and shut the deterrent down. The system shall
be effective, reliable, safe (both for animals and people), low-power,
and quiet enough to avoid waking someone during night operation –
no louder than an automatic sprinkler system. The system shall include
multiple safety features, including an emergency stop and closed motor
operations, such that a person cannot cause injury to themselves.
Our prototype consists of a webcam that inputs into a computer that uses motion tracking software to target any unwanted entities. The program in turn uses the parallel port to communicate to our printed circuit board that optically isolates the parallel port from the rest of our circuitry. This circuitry uses relays to turn on and off the pan/tilt controller and the rotational motor. We have two 5V infrared sensors that we use to input to the computer that senses movement infront of and behind the turret. When there is enough movement in front or behind, then the rotational motor will move the upper assembly towards the disturbance. This is done because the webcam can only see roughly 60 degrees and we want to cover a larger area. Once it has been rotated the program will start tracking motion again.
Here is our Project Proposal and Feasibility Study in pdf:
Here is the final design report
