So a guy from my homebrew club introduced me to arduino, and coming from a programming background, my mind began to dance with visions of arduino controlled sugar plums 
. Good gawd, after watching the "what is arduino" video - I'm officially hooked. I immediately went over to amazon, and bought $350 worth of sensors, the uno, and all kinds of other technie nerd porn. I've been reading up on different projects ever since, and can't wait for all the stuff I ordered to arrive.
So, I plan to dive in over my head. This isn't the first time I've gone overboard on something like this - I recently finished building the electric brewery (theelectricbrewery.com) for my home brewing setup. It took me a while to get all the pieces and understand all the concepts, but I learned a ton and enjoyed it every step of the way. The drawback? It's mostly analog, and has no interface with a regular computer, so I couldn't use my programming background to build any type of enhancements or brewing profiles into the setup.
My Project - The Talos Anti-Pest Systeml
I've been thinking of a cool, nerdy name for the project, and came up with "Talos" (the name of a US anti-aircraft missle). My garage is overloaded when I'm trying to brew with moths, mosquito hawks, and those idiotic, kamikaze red flying beetles whose only lot in life seems to be doinking off my head and into my brews. So I've been doing some reading on motion tracking systems, and want to put an 'iron dome' around my garage door that can eliminate any flying vermin seeking to ruin 5 gallons of my latest brew! I want it to destroy ground based vermin and air based pests - preferably with a UV based laser. So here's what I've discovered. I'm sure there are holes in my ideas, so be sure and point them out. The system will be comprised of 3 components - target acquisition and identification, target tracking, and target elimination.
I. Target Acquisition & Identification
I plan to use motion tracking detected by a camera directly connected to a computer. To accomplish this, I "think" I'll need the following things:
- A camera with at least 1.3 mp of resolution, that shoots deinterlaced video, that provides a very fast fps rate (60 fps would be preferable, though I think 30 fps can probably accomplish what I'm looking to do). Since the camera needs to have a fast refresh rate, could I still use wifi to connect the camera to the computer, or does it need to be a wired camera?
- The stationary camera will feed a GPU algorithm that will be used to detect and analyze any pixel changes for pests moving in the air or along the ground. While I would prefer it to distinguish between the type of insects it's about to destroy, I think that is probably asking a bit too much (or would make the project less than economical). Simple identification of the moving object should be enough as long as the object is not larger than a certain parameter (like say, an inch), so it doesn't bother following larger objects.
- The camera may need some help in spotting the bugs - especially the smaller stuff like mosquitos and even pantry moths. I plan on painting an 18" white stripe across the length of the entry way on the garage floor that will run into my white vinyl siding, and then light the whole setup.
II. Target Tracking
Now here's where I start to get a bit fuzzy. How should I go about synchronizing the position of the target to the death ray? Obviously, this is where arduino comes in. I assume the camera and death ray should be mounted on the same platform, so that the laser can be calibrated to a position recognized by the motion tracking algorithm. Perhaps putting in some measured reference points, like black crosses, that have predetermined distances programmed in could help with the targeting? Anyways, the laser would be mounted on a pan/tilt camera base (assuming the servos in that are fast enough), and this unit will be fed data and controlled by arduino - telling it where to point and when to fire.
With regards to target positioning, can I accomplish it with one camera? I'm not exactly sure how to accomplish that, as cameras typically only provide a 2D image, so how I don't see how one camera could be used to track a target in a 3 dimensional environment? Perhaps 2 cameras or 3 cameras should be used in a triangulation effort?
If cameras aren't the way to go, is there another method of tracking I should consider such as hypersonic, ranging detector, or microwave?
III. Target Elimination
I haven't done a lot of research on this, but planned on using a laser as the main means of destroying the targets. Now I'm not sure that would be powerful enough to take out the bettles, because I've only ever seen a laser used to burn the wings off mosquitoes - which are incredibly thin. So if a laser isn't powerful enough (or economical), what else could be used?
Thanks for any tips on getting the basis of this off the ground. Any tips on developing the tracking system's precision, accuracy, and how exact it can be in picking out targets no matter how small they are would be greatly appreciated. 
~Jeff
but i didn't know how friends and family and LAW would like an array of blue burning laser turrets protecting my house lol