Andrej Karpathy (co-founder of OpenAI, Eureka Labs): "The best way to learn machine learning is to build something real." This person had a pigeon problem and built a real-time computer vision targeting system. Here is the full architecture of a $50 autonomous bird defense sentry: → USB camera: continuous video feed monitoring the balcony 24/7 → neural network: real-time pigeon identification, not motion detection, actual species classification → 2 servo motors: aim the water gun at the identified target automatically → water gun: fires on detection with zero human input in the loop → Orange Pi 5: entire system runs on $50 of hardware → fully open source: every line of code available to replicate The pigeon problem was not important. The system required real-time object detection, servo control, and autonomous decision-making. That made it the perfect project. Follow @neil_xbt for more AI builder intelligence.