Science Fair Project

Using Arduino Project Guidance
1

Hello,
I am a middle school student and I would like to use Arduino in my science fair project. I have an idea to basically build a scanner you can use to scan unknown animal/insect bites and to be able to get results on which animal might have bit you. I am new to Arduino programming and am unsure how to program this. Also, what materials do i use for this project?

Thanks :),
Techy

2

What do you mean by scanning? Do you mean have a camera that looks at the bite to assess it? I don't think anyone can tell definitively by just looking at a bug bite which bug bit you.

I think you'd need to identify toxins, enzymes, and bacteria to identify which bug bit you. That is going to take some pretty heavy duty chemical sensing.

3

Agreed, I think you should change it to asses the size of red area and then recommend an amount of medication. Much easier and equally as cool.

4

I wish I had been using Arduino in middle school, that is really cool. That said, identifying a bite by visual means could be very hard. The programming would probably be very advanced and might involve machine learning. I as a college electrical engineering student would consider it beyond my programming skills, but I am more of a hardware person.

What I can say is that this type of visual identification would likely need something with more processing power and more memory. A smartphone app would be more doable, but even that may need a server to crunch the numbers. The other issue is that bites look very similar and may be indistinguishable visually.

You can certainly take a stab at it, but realize that this would be a challenging problem for anyone on this forum and even the likes of Google or Microsoft.

5

Very cool to hear your ambitious plans!
Hopefully you can continue to do some research and find a way to make this possible.
However, image inspection at the level you're talking about is on par with industrial vision applications.
Typically, I see this done with a dedicated, hardened industrial controller known as a PLC. These provide tools known as "blocks" required to communicate with the camera. (Usually through TCP/IP)

http://www.teledynedalsa.com/imaging/markets/mv/semi-inspect/

6

Arduino is not good at image processing.
You'd have more chance to do it in a reasonable amount of time with a Raspberry Pi, or even a full fledged computer.

7

jroorda:
You can certainly take a stab at it

XD