I am relatively new to the world of arduino and trying to start working experimentaly on a few more advanced projects. I trying to to think what kind of sensors I could use in order to recognize a moving object (as well as its position if possible) that will be marked with a small amount of electric paint.
sample use case could be:
mark a queen bee with small amount of electric paint and put it inside an artificial hive with the rest of the bees. I d like to be able to distinguish the queen from the rest of the bees (that are not marked) and:
see whether it moves or not.
find her position (aproximately) if possible.
I thought of electric paint as a solution as I thought I could use a magnetic or electrical field sensor to "see" the queen and its possible movement. I might be quite off from what I am trying to achieve, that's why I d really like your thoughts on this!
Here are 10 things you can do with conductive paint or electric paint.
Marking bees or insects is not one of them. Think of this as conductive paint so it needs a current source to do anything. It's not like a radioactive isotope that will light up under certain scanning conditions. It's a paint which when dry will conduct a small amount of electric current but the current needs a source, it does not make electricity.
I can tottally understand that! I was thinking that conductive paint would have the same properties as any conductive metal material meaning that a "metal dector" like set of sensors could possibly "find" a painted bee among all the other bees in the hive (due to magnietic properties for example).
Does that make any sense?
I though of maybe using other things like fluorescent paint or similiar but then I ll need a camera,which won't be able to see throught the frames inside a beehive.
what I am trying to do for this specific project would be to able to distinguish the queen from the rest and be able to find out that it moves in order to prove whether it is alive or not. Thus I ended up to the thought above that I thought it would be quite usefull if I could "sense" the conductive paint somehow.
While I can tell you that marking a queen or any other bee with conductive paint won't work as you wish I have no ideas as to what will work. Not like you can place a RFID tag in a bee.
For certain medical scans they inject an isotope a few hours before which "light up" certain cells but I can't see how to relate that to bees. Maybe someone else has a thought?