Here is a picture of the haystack. One specific horse has access to one long and one short side of the haystack (there are 2 groups of horses around this one haystack).
-
wildthing21
- Posts: 1
- Joined: Sun Oct 29, 2017 4:44 pm
Proximity or Line Crossing Sensor System
I need some advice for an outdoor project that I am working on. I would like to measure the amount of time that our horses (or for simplification: one horse) spend with feeding. They get hay from a haystack. I would like to measure when the head of the horse is "inside" the haystack. I can place a sensor on the horses neck with some sort of belt, but what technology can I use for the haystack? What would you recommend?
Here is a picture of the haystack. One specific horse has access to one long and one short side of the haystack (there are 2 groups of horses around this one haystack).
Here is a picture of the haystack. One specific horse has access to one long and one short side of the haystack (there are 2 groups of horses around this one haystack).
Re: Proximity or Line Crossing Sensor System
What location accuracy do you need?
My initial thought was to have a GPS unit attached to the horse.
Do they spend a lot of time near the hay when not feeding?
My initial thought was to have a GPS unit attached to the horse.
Do they spend a lot of time near the hay when not feeding?
Re: Proximity or Line Crossing Sensor System
Maybe you could use RFID tags and readers. Are the horses already tagged?
Sure Flap cat doors have an RFID detector coil around the outer aperture that reads the implanted tag on in the neck when the cat puts its head up to the flap.
Perhaps a much larger coil could be places around each of several feeding ports that the horses put their heads through to access the hay.
Maybe you could paint UV fluorescing ink on the horses' heads and read the pattern that lights up under a darklight using a camera.
If you don't need to ID the horse you could set-up through-beam opto-sensors so that a horse's head interrupts the beam when it's feeding.
Maybe pressure mats that the horse has to stand on to reach the hay could be used.
Something like Tensor Flow might be able to identify which horses have their heads at the haystack just from their faces.
Sure Flap cat doors have an RFID detector coil around the outer aperture that reads the implanted tag on in the neck when the cat puts its head up to the flap.
Perhaps a much larger coil could be places around each of several feeding ports that the horses put their heads through to access the hay.
Maybe you could paint UV fluorescing ink on the horses' heads and read the pattern that lights up under a darklight using a camera.
If you don't need to ID the horse you could set-up through-beam opto-sensors so that a horse's head interrupts the beam when it's feeding.
Maybe pressure mats that the horse has to stand on to reach the hay could be used.
Something like Tensor Flow might be able to identify which horses have their heads at the haystack just from their faces.
-
OutoftheBOTS
- Posts: 711
- Joined: Tue Aug 01, 2017 10:06 am
Re: Proximity or Line Crossing Sensor System
This certainly screams RFID tags to me. This is very classic use for them. This is how toll tags work for cars driving through a toll gate or cattle at a slaughter house. You can simply have a counter that increments 1 unit every time the tag has been in distance for 10secs (or something like that).
There r 2 types of tags: passive and active. Basicly if they have there own power supply on board or not. The passive type have a range of about 10cm but active tags can have ranges up to 100m depending upon the tags. you might look at something like this https://www.aliexpress.com/item/uhf-epc ... 094cc8c55c
There r 2 types of tags: passive and active. Basicly if they have there own power supply on board or not. The passive type have a range of about 10cm but active tags can have ranges up to 100m depending upon the tags. you might look at something like this https://www.aliexpress.com/item/uhf-epc ... 094cc8c55c