Defending your backyard from undesirable vegetation and extra weeds is half of the gardening course of. One maker and developer, aka Nathan from NathanBuildsDIY, has taken the matter to a completely new stage by creating this spectacular Raspberry Pi-powered answer. After deliberating potential avenues, he settled on creating an AI-driven robotic that identifies weeds earlier than utilizing a Fresnel lens to pay attention mild from the solar onto the weeds till they burn.
The system consists of a big picket body that may be wheeled up and down paths in your backyard. It has a digicam for observing the territory that the Pi evaluates for potential weeds. As soon as an undesirable plant is noticed, its Fresnel lens is moved into place whereas the machine waits till the weed is sufficiently burned.
Nathan was type sufficient to not solely show the undertaking but in addition share a video fully breaking down the construct course of making it simple for anybody to recreate themselves. He consists of all the things from the bodily schematics to wiring diagrams in addition to delving deep into the code used to function the system.
A full elements record is on the market within the video description however right here’s a quick abstract of essentially the most main parts. It makes use of a Raspberry Pi 3B+ however you might simply swap this with a Raspberry Pi 4 or perhaps a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. A Fresnel lens is important to focus the daylight to burn the vegetation, that is put into place with a sequence of wheels and motors. Every little thing is powered by a LiPo battery and held into place with a customized picket body.
Picture 1 of 2
A good bit of software program is required to program the unit. You possibly can anticipate some acquainted functions should you’ve tinkered with AI on the Pi earlier than. You’ll want OpenCV in addition to Tflite (Tensorflow Lite) to run Tensorflow on the Pi. Different fundamental libraries are used as nicely, with Picamera getting used to regulate and take photographs with the official Raspberry Pi digicam..
If you wish to get a more in-depth have a look at this Raspberry Pi undertaking, we extremely advocate trying out the video so you possibly can see it in motion. Go to Nathan’s official YouTube channel, NathanBuildsDIY, for an in-depth have a look at this spectacular gardening device and be sure you observe him for extra cool creations.