This Raspberry Pi computer can shoot actual laser beams

A PhD student from Russia has used a Raspberry Pi and some other innocent pieces of tech to design an innovative solution that neutralizes mosquitos using lasers.

Rakhmatulin Ildar from South Ural State University says he lost his cool when he learnt that mosquitoes kill over 700,000 people every year, and decided to do something about it.

Ildar's solution was to mount a 1-watt laser on a Raspberry Pi 3 and train it with machine vision and neural networks until it became a ruthless mosquito hunting killer automaton.

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On a rampage

Tom’s Hardware intercepted Rakhmatulin's frighteningly detailed build instructions, noting that the project uses the Raspberry Pi Camera module to detect mosquitoes in its vicinity. 

When one is spotted, the Pi asks a connected galvanometer to adjust the mirrors and orient the laser. Once the lasers are in position, the Pi powers it up and delivers a potent burst to zap the flying creten out of existence. 

Rakhmatulin has shared details on how he created a convolutional neural network (CNN) to detect mosquitoes. To perfect the AI network he trained it using a GeForce GTX 1060 6GB GPU with the Ryzen 5 3600 CPU.

He’s also published details about his use of the OpenCV library to track an identified mosquito and predict its flight pattern.

Buoyed by the success of his research, Rakhmatulin now wants to build a more powerful version that can track and eliminate more than two mosquitoes in a second. 

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Via: Tom’s Hardware

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