mlweber/taubenturret

Taubenturret is the control software for a homemade automated water turret designed to gently scare pigeons away from a specific area, such as a balcony or window ledge. The name combines the German word for pigeon with turret. It pairs with a physical 3D printed device whose build files are shared separately on a site called Makerworld, and this repository is only the software that runs the brains of the system. The turret uses a Raspberry Pi camera to watch for motion, and when something moves it sends the image to an external AI object detection service to check whether the moving object is actually a pigeon before deciding to act. Once a pigeon is confirmed, the software calculates the physical pan and tilt angles needed to aim the water gun at the target, converting from the flat two dimensional camera image to the real three dimensional angles, then drives small PWM controlled servos to point the turret and fires a burst of water. A built in web interface, built with FastAPI, lets an owner watch a live video stream from the camera, fire the turret manually, and browse a library of previously recorded video clips, since the system automatically saves a short video every time it detects motion and fires. All of this is protected behind a basic username and password login on the web page. Setting it up requires a Raspberry Pi with its camera module, Python 3.9 or newer, and a set of Python packages including FastAPI, OpenCV, and the Raspberry Pi camera library, plus a running copy of a separate companion project that provides the actual object detection service the turret calls out to. Configuration happens through an environment file where the owner sets login credentials, the detection service address, and careful tuning values for the servos and water gun so the hardware does not over rotate or fire longer than intended.