| Project: CrowBox | |
|---|---|
  CrowBox | |
| Naam | CrowBox |
| Door | Erik Goff |
| Status | idee |
| Madskillz | houtbewerken, electronica, programming |
| Doel / Omschrijving | |
| Teach Crows how to trade bottlecaps or cigarette buds for treats | |
| Alle Projecten - Project Toevoegen | |
noezCrows can help to make our cities clean!
The idea is to eventually teach crows and other intelligent birds to pick up cigarette buds or other trash and trade it in for a treat, likely a peanut.
Project needs a few phases :
- make a simple bird feeder for crows and put it on the roof, see if any crows are interested
- place a webcam with movement detection opposite the feeder so we can see what happens
once we have our flock of crows we can start training them. For that we need a crowbox, which is an open source effort: http://www.thecrowbox.com/ The idea is to make a food dispenser for crows, that gives out food every time they pay with a bottle cap. i think a bottle cap is easier to detect than a cigarette bud so it seems easier to build.
some random thoughts : also place prototypes of these crowboxes in other locations where crows hang out, like the watermolen in arnhem. If the distance between the crowboxes are small enough, groups of crows might teach each other. It will also educate people so there might be more crowboxes worldwide. There are trillions of cigarette buds to clean up !
C.R.O.W.S. = Creative self-Replicating Organic Waste Separators (any other creative ideas ?)
If you are interested, feel free to join in this project. Lets Crow out !
more ideas :
- we could set up a crypto micropayment webcam where people pay a little crypto and with that they activate the bird feeder and place extra peanuts
- the feeder should have MouseProtection(tm)
- futher in the future, we could make puzzles for the crows and do intelligence research
[Kickoff]
- After more research i found that it is easy to train the birds into picking any trash. There is no need for an object detector so they dont throw in stones etc, if you train them properly
- the birds seem to love dry cat food
- the dispenser of food needs to be variable so we can figure out the right economics ( how much food makes it worthwile for the bird ? ). One idea is to use a drill as wormwheel