Reddit Engineer Weaponizes AI Against Pigeons—And the Internet Wants In

When pigeons turned a Reddit user’s balcony into their personal bathroom, he didn’t call an exterminator. He built a turret.

Armed with an Orange Pi 5 mini-computer, a USB camera, and some clever programming, this tech-minded problem-solver created an autonomous water gun system that spots pigeons in real time and blasts them away before they can land. The setup uses yolo_world_v2l, an open vocabulary object detection neural network, to identify the unwanted birds. Two servo motors aim the electric water gun, while resistors and a transistor handle the trigger. It’s basically a pigeon-seeking missile system, except it’s filled with water and mounted on a balcony.

The result? A viral demonstration that had social media users instantly imagining the possibilities.“This is amazing haha! You should make this a real product, I bet it would sell!”one commenter gushed. Another asked if the creator could adapt the tech to keep cats off lawns. The interest was so genuine, so immediate, that you could almost hear the collective sound of patent lawyers sharpening their pencils.

What makes this story stick isn’t just the clever engineering—it’s that the creator solved a genuinely frustrating problem in a way that’s both absurdly over-engineered and somehow completely practical. Pigeons are relentless. They’re smart enough to adapt to most deterrents, but they’re not smart enough to dodge a jet of water fired by a neural network. The system is straightforward: camera spots pigeon, AI confirms it’s a pigeon, motors aim, water goes brrr, pigeon leaves.

The creator hasn’t mentioned any plans to commercialize the design, but that didn’t stop people from imagining it in stores next to bug zappers and bird netting. You could train the model to recognize almost any animal—or theoretically, even people. That flexibility is both the charm and the slight unease of a tool this adaptable. For now, though, it’s just one person’s gloriously excessive answer to a pigeon problem. And honestly? We’re here for it.