Crow Digital Display and Feeder

Project Title: Crow Digital Display and Feeder

Description: Hamilton is the playground and habitat for flocks of crows, which can often be heard and seen gamboling about the college grounds. Several of these crows reside in Hamilton’s own aviary year-round, which offers students and faculty a chance to study the behaviors of crows — a genus whose intelligence is notable compared to other birds. In order to test the crows’ cognitive abilities, members of Digital Initiatives, Scholarship, and Collaboration (DISC) assisted Andrea Townsend, Associate Professor of Biology, in creating an interactive feeder. The DISC team designed the apparatus, modeled and 3D-printed its mechanisms in the library’s Tech Lab, constructed its hardware, and coded memory games for the crows to play. The device links an infrared frame to a virtual display connected to a Raspberry Pi, which in turn wires to a motor and small LED. When a crow selects the target item on the screen, the motor operates the 3D-printed feeder structure, dispensing a treat to the bird. Originally tested last semester, the newly-updated device will be placed into the campus aviary, where Townsend and students can observe how crows make memory-based associations between images on the screen and dispensed food. 

Deliverables: Electronics

Date: 2023 - 2024