TaubenTurret Mk II

An AI-guided, custom-built pigeon deterrent for my boathouse

The Problem

My boathouse has a pigeon problem. They roost in the rafters, and everything underneath (the dock boards, the gear, the boat) ends up covered in droppings. It's corrosive, it's a pain to clean, and it builds up fast.

The boathouse is over an hour's drive from home, so shooing them off in person isn't an option. I needed something that works on its own, and I didn't want anything that would hurt the birds. I just wanted them to find somewhere else to live.

Then I found MLWeber's open-source TaubenTurret: a camera and AI spot pigeons and give them a harmless burst of water. It was exactly the kind of build I love, so I made my own. I kept the software brain, upgraded it to a Raspberry Pi 5 with a wide-angle camera, and designed the turret itself from scratch.

Now it sits in the boathouse and watches. When a pigeon lands, the turret swings round, locks on and gives it a splash.

Under the Hood

Inside the base is the turret's brain: a Raspberry Pi 5 running the camera, motion detection and the web dashboard, plus the servo power and relay wiring that aims and fires the water cannon.

A 20V supply is stepped down through a buck converter to feed the two digital servos, the relay triggers the pump, and the whole lot is cooled by four filtered 40mm fans.

Everything is laid out so it can be serviced on site, with UPS backup for the boathouse's patchy power.

What's New in This Build

ORIGINAL TURRET DESIGN

Designed and 3D-printed from scratch, in a completely different shape from the original:

• Turntable-bearing base for smooth, stable pans

• Belt-driven pan and tilt with 2.4:1 pulley reduction, driven by DS3225MG and DS3218MG digital servos

• Custom water cannon: water gun internals rehoused in my own body, with a built-in voltage display and lit muzzle, fed from a bucket reservoir

• Four filtered 40mm fans for active cooling

• Edge damping so it eases in near its ±37.5° pan limit

RASPBERRY PI 5 UPGRADE

The original software targets the Pi Zero 2 W. The Pi 5's RP1 chip handles hardware PWM differently, so the stock servo code couldn't drive the turret. I traced it to the PWM channel mapping and patched it.

WIDE-ANGLE CAMERA MODULE 3

Upgraded from Camera Module v2 to Camera Module 3 Wide (102° field of view). I recalibrated the aiming maths for the new lens and sensor, which fixed auto-aim drift.

HOW IT WORKS

Motion on the camera triggers a check by a YOLO object-detection model on a separate Linux server. When a bird is confirmed, the turret aims and fires. A live web dashboard shows the feed and allows click-to-aim.

Status: deployed at the boathouse on UPS backup. Auto-aim still being tuned.

Credits: software based on TaubenTurret by MLWeber (GPL-3.0), with my Pi 5 and Camera Module 3 changes. The turret hardware is my own design. Pi 5 debugging and this write-up done with help from Claude, Anthropic's AI assistant.