Automatic cat feeder made with recycled laminator parts

May 6, 2012 By Leave a Comment

automatic-cat-feeder

When [Antoine] and his family leave home for a few days, they usually have to find a neighbor who is willing to care for their cats while they are away. Instead of bothering the people who live next door, he decided it would be best to build an automatic cat feeder (Translation) instead.

[Antoine] originally tried building an auger to distribute the food, but it didn’t work as well as he had hoped. He opted to build a dispenser out of wood instead, driving the feeding wheel with an old microwave platter motor. The motor did not have enough torque to do the job, so he dismantled an old laminator, which had a more suitable motor inside.

He built a large hopper (Translation) out of wood and left over acrylic sheeting, which stores the cat food and houses all of the electronics used in the feeder. He controls the amount of food and feeding intervals using a pair of buttons and a small LCD display, all of which are controlled by an Arduino Nano.

While [Antoine] has not yet shared the source code that drives the feeder, he does have a demo video which you can watch below.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: arduino hacks, home hacks Tagged With: , ,

Using Arduino shields with the Raspberry Pi

May 6, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Since the Arduino was launched years ago, many ‘shields’ or add-on boards providing additional functionality have been released. There are hundreds of different shields, from video capture shields to touch screen shields. Now that the Raspberry Pi is out in the wild, it was only a matter of time before a RasPi to Arduino shield bridge was created.

[Omer] calls his bridge ‘Ponte’ and it allows Arduino shields to be used with the incredible  horsepower of an embedded Linux system. While [Omer] originally expected to write the RasPi to Arduino software converter himself, but found WiringPi halfway through the build. Of course this build comes just a day after we saw a tutorial on controlling the GPIO pins on the RasPi, and we expect to see similar GPIO-hacking builds in the future.

Right now, the Ponte only supports Arduino Uno-sized shield, so the possibility of an all-in-one RepRap controller using the RAMPS motor driver is impossible for now. We expect that to change very quickly as more people get their RasPis delivered.

Filed Under: arduino hacks, Rasberry pi Tagged With: , , ,

Converting a manual camera lens to use motorized zoom and focus

May 6, 2012 By Leave a Comment

[Guy] wrote in to share this motorized camera lens project he recently finished. He really loved the zoom lens, but since both zoom and focus are manually controlled, he sometimes had trouble getting both set to the right place in time to take the shot. With modern DSLR cameras which allow video capture, he also wants to have the option of a smooth zoom that is always in focus. The solution was to add motors to the rings and control them with a Wii classic controller.

This hack really shines when it comes to the add-on hardware. He has some beautifully made rings which wrap around the focus and zoom rings on the lens. They are then held in place by a timing belt. These belts have teeth which key into the gears on a pair of servo motors. From there it’s a snap to drive the motors with an Arduino, connecting to the Wii controller with a breakout connector. You can see [Guy] showing off the build in the clip after the break.

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Filed Under: digital cameras hacks Tagged With: , , , , ,

Automatic airplane tracking; what radar-systems engineers do for kicks

May 4, 2012 By Leave a Comment

[G. Eric Rogers] is a radar-systems engineer who just happens to live within sight of the aircraft approach path for the local airport. We wonder if that was one of the criteria when looking for a home? Naturally, he wanted his own home-based system for tracking the airplanes. He ended up repurposing a motorized telescope for this purpose.

The system does not actually use Radar for tracking. Instead, the camera strapped to the telescope is feeding a video experimenter shield. A tracking algorithm analyzes the video and extrapolates vector data. From there, the base unit can be controlled by the Arduino via an RS232 interface.

There are some bugs in the system right now. The Arduino has something of an ADHD problem, losing interesting and going to sleep in the middle of the tracking process. [Eric’s] workaround uses the RS232 board to periodically reset the Arduino, but he hopes to squash this bug soon.

Filed Under: video hacks Tagged With: , , , ,

Reaching out to a touch screen with a microcontroller

May 4, 2012 By Leave a Comment

We love capacitive touch screens. They’re much more robust than resistive touch screens and if the UI is programmed well they produce a great user experience. But getting your electronics project to interact with one is a bit tough. [RobB] has been experimenting in that area, and managed to build a simple touchscreen actuator for microcontroller use.

In the video after the break you can see his proof of concept. He’s using an Arduino to enter the number 2 on an Android  iOS calculator app once every second. It doesn’t take much to pull off this trick, [RopB] just taped a piece of tin foil to the screen and connected it to the Arduino with a jumper wire. The pin is left floating until a screen tap is needed, at which point it is pulled to ground.

A custom app operating at slow speeds could use this as an input technique. Two pieces of foil (one acting as clock, the other data) would provide a rudimentary serial transfer system.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: multitouch hacks Tagged With: , , ,

Arduino PIC programmer writes to 18F family

May 4, 2012 By Leave a Comment

[Kirill] wrote in to share his Arduino-based PIC programmer. It is capable of writing to the 18F family of chips, including 18F2XXX and 18F4XXX. We think that’s pretty exciting because this line of chips has USB functionality and there are bootloaders out there that let you program them via USB. So if you wanted to build your own PIC dev-board (like this one) you can use your Arduino to flash the bootloader.

This post comes hot on the heels of the Arduino being used as a PIC 16F programmer. That hack has a rudimentary programming GUI, something that [Kirill] admits his lacks but has no plans to implement himself. Perhaps someone will do a little porting work to merge the projects, adding to the range of chips supported by this programming technique.

Filed Under: arduino hacks, Microcontrollers Tagged With: ,
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