2025-06-13 –, D105 (capacity 300)
How a camera, a raspberry pi, a former engineer, an LLM, and some nasty nasty squirrels worked together to build the ultimate squirrel defense system.
A guided tour of building an AI-driven squirrel detector that will attempt to deter squirrels from stealing bird seed from bird feeders (Narrator: It didn't keep the squirrels away). I'll walk through how I worked with an LLM to rubber duck implementation and installation ideas. I'll talk about how I fine tuned an existing lightweight model to focus on recognizing squirrels. And, I'll describe the actual squirrel deterrent mechanism. While I expect this to be heavy on technical details, I'm here for calling out my failures along the way. Let's have fun commiserating about persistent squirrels.
Beginner - no experience needed
I have been at Red Hat for 18 years, and have spent the last 10 years as an engineering manager across a number of products, including OpenShift, Ansible, and RHEL. I try to stay current on Red Hat Technologies, but often find I'm playing catch up. Outside of work, I spend time with my family, try to keep our cats entertained, and play drums when I get the chance.