Duck Off

We live on a rural property and have around 20 to 40 wild ducks around at any one time. We have a large dam and jetty, however it is almost unusable due to all the duck poo. So I decided to make a duck scarcer/repellent.  We are more than happy to have them all wandering around, BUT not shitting on the jetty.

It uses both a passive IR and a microwave presence sensor to detect ducks.  Once triggered it delivers and light and sound show for 10 seconds, if within that time period there is still activity, it changes into Blast mode and really ups the shock and awe for another 10 seconds. It then goes into recovery mode.

The noise is generated by a simple 2 transistor amplifier, fed from a PWM output and driving a 12V 5W horn speaker (because that is what I had lying around).  The Play routine takes a list of tuples and plays varying frequency and volume combinations that are customizable and hopefully scary to ducks. Their hearing range is similar to ours. The play routine also drives the strobe lights, which are hopefully also scary.

https://youtube.com/shorts/f2WUhRsC7lQ

https://youtube.com/shorts/twOLctHPTis

Full build instructions here…  

https://core-electronics.com.au/projects/duck-off-duck-repellent-device/

Code here..

https://github.com/MarkMakies/Duck-Off