This is going to drive my colleagues nuts


Free ranging fish tanks! All over the building!

It’s a straightforward gadget: a camera senses the location of the fish in the tank, and uses that to control the steering. Zebrafish are schooling animals, so it would be cool to see them coordinating in mass formations dominating all the open spaces in the building.

Except for the stairs. Stairs would be most uncool.

Comments

  1. carlie says

    “Except for the stairs. Stairs would be most uncool.”

    Just give it time. Daleks had trouble with stairs too.

    For awhile.

  2. Larry says

    Oh that’s just great! Mobility is the first step towards total world domination by the fish. Well, that and opposable thumbs and brains larger than a grain of sand. Oh, and the ability to breathe air. They aren’t there yet but it’s happened once before…

    Damn you, Carnegie Mellon! Damn you to hell!

  3. davidnangle says

    A little more equipment and software, and you can have the Jaws theme play as the tanks slowly come up behind busy, distracted humans.

  4. Snarki, child of Loki says

    We’re going to be needing more of these for our aquatic overlords from Zeta Reticulon 7, you know.

  5. michaelvieths says

    Suddenly I feel as though we wasted a lot of time and effort evolving to walk on land.

  6. whheydt says

    There are a *lot* fo cool Raspberry Pi driven projects. Quite a few people are using Pis to control various aspects of aquarium management. Probably worth looking into for your lab….

    For those unfamiliar with the Pi, it’s an inexpensive ($35 for the top model) Single Board Computer. The usual OS to run is a distro of Linux. The organization behind it–the Raspberry Pi Foundation–is a UK charity with a goal of promoting computing knowledge for children. The Pis have been adopted by the maker/DIY/tinkerer communities (and industrial/embedded as well) with glad cries of glee. Since the initial launch in 2012, about 13 million Pis have sold. Having passed the number of Commodore computers sold, the Pi is the third largest volume computer line in history, beaten out only by the Mac and PC.

    I have the minor problem that I’ve lost track of how many Pis I have. I believe the total is upwards of 30. My “most used” one is my alarm clock…

  7. unclefrogy says

    I saw the fish hammer on unstructables this morning the article before the actual how I did it is very droll. I immediately thought of changing it to have hammer strike tuned metal bars to make fish music.
    amazing!
    uncle frogy

  8. Dark Jaguar says

    That tank better have a nice safe dead zone in the middle so the fish can comfortably move around without moving the tank. Otherwise, this is some sort of moist nightmare.

  9. indianajones says

    I hope you aren’t wasting tax payers money on this! To clarify, you should TOTALLY ‘waste’ tax payers money on this.

  10. iiandyiiii says

    I, for one, would like welcome our new fish overlords. I’d like to point out that I’d make an excellent overseer, due to my communications skills and burliness, in the coming intensive worm and insect factory farms. Hail fish!

  11. Chakat Firepaw says

    We see here an early test of Dr. Ghoti’s “Tank of Land Dweller Doom!”, shortly before Captain Squid apprehended him for the first time.