Author: Yuening

My final project is a remote cat toy that enables you to play with your cat when you’re not at home. My original plan is to use a camera as the monitor and a cat teaser to play with your cat. However after two weeks working with the ArduCam. I gave up on building the camera by myself. I think to buy a security camera on the market will get a much higher resolution and a better result. So my cat toy changed to a treat dispenser to attract the cat and use the teaser to play with him.

I used 2 servos. The cat teaser is attached to the one that can spin around. The dispenser took me some time to figure out how to give only one treat by a time. I cut the bottle mouth and used the servo to move the circle sector that can take one treat. I built a hand-cut cardboard model first to measure the sizes and put it into Illustrator to laser cut on acrylic sheets. After that, I tested my product with my cats.

Some problems I found and would improve on in the future:

1. the cat toy moves so fast that cat can’t really follow it.
2. the tray is too small for the cat to get the treat.
3. The whole product is too light so it moves easily when pushed by a cat.

For the final project, I would like to make a new version of the cat tweet box, a remote cat toy. This product would help the cat owners to play with their cat when they are not at home.

From the cat owners perspective, when they want to play with their cat, they can open up an HTML page which connects to the device and controls the cat teaser. Cat owners can also see through the camera to know what the cat is doing.

For the cat, if the cat touches the cat teaser by himself, the cat owner will receive a text message saying that “Your cat wants to play with you!”

Materials

1. ArduCam mini camera. Suitable 3V board.
2. Motor to move the cat teaser
3. conductive cat teaser. metal string
4. Esp8266 board

I decided to put an ultrasonic distant sensor on the cat litter box to send me a notification whenever my cat uses the litter box. I created an Applet on IFTTT to send me a text message when the cat is less than 10cm close to the litter box. When I tried to put it on the litter box, I realized my cat will play with it and ruin the sensor, so this is not very practical.

The work that inspired me is an installation I found online a year ago. Unfortunately I couldn’t find it now. It is an Arduino based project with some LCDs and speakers. It used the Twitter API to capture all tweets that have the word “I am” and showed it on LCDs and played in the speaker. I think it is interested to see how people identified themselves and sometimes say it unconsciously.

When I tried to find Internet infrastructure on the street, I looked for something that connected to the internet. The first thing I noticed is a machine to call the police and fire. It has many paints and ads on it. The second is the car parking payment machine. The third is the box on the traffic light. I think it is to control the traffic light.

For my midterm project, I wanted to continue working on my pulse sensor. I figured out how to get the cardiogram with the help of Scott by adding the correct resistors. I build a box using laser-cutter to cut the frame and paper to mimic the crystal ball. I then drew a hand shape on it as the signifier. I spend a lot of time writing the p5 code because I kind of forgot it. So I had to change my idea form the shaking heart to the fortune-telling memes. Based on the feedback in class, I’ll be more careful when contextualizing the data value by thinking more about people’s uniqueness and difference.

Testing with a blinking LED

Final version

I decided to use the photocell to control the background color of the HTML. I first tried on my phone’s hotspot since the linksys network is not stable at all. I changed the HTML code so the color of the text changed based on the data received from the photocell. After that I tried on the computer and it also works!

Wire

Video

Test on my phone