this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2025
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Neat! Just make them solar and we're set
Expert on shooting plants with laser beams here. Not quite enough power yet but a swappable battery system and a renewable source with a molten salt reactor could easily solve that problem.
EE (specifically embedded systems) here: just how much power do you need to zap a weed effectively? I would’ve thought a 40W laser would have been more than enough, and then scale that up for a hundred acres.
only solar would be tough, but a small EV battery with a large panel in the sun for 12h seems like it’d be a lot of juice to run WeedZapper2000 with a topping off charge overnight, no?
The problem is not that you need to run a single laser, but multiple lasers in order to have some form of usable working width. Then you also need to power the cooling and the computer for the plant detection. If you build some form of small scale robot it should work with solar, but any machine that is designed to get the job done relatively quick probably won't work.
Interesting; I thought this worked be a single high power laser (or a few) with galvanometers for targeting.
Would love to learn more about how it’s really done (as opposed to how I imagine it’d be done).
The problem with a single laser is, that, in order to achieve bigger working widths, it would have to be able to rotate very accurately, very fast and not shoot your crops at the same time. Especially the latter makes it impossible to use a single one.
You also dont have to "burn" the weeds. It is enough to destroy certain cells to stop them from growing.
Cool freaking tech. Build a micro version of this for yards that kills dandy lions and you'll be rich.