Right now we're just working on the physical part of the project and this weekend we were able to get some of the elements of our cat amusement center to work.
We started on Saturday by heading over to Petland to buy a cat scratching post. We found a fashionable sky-blue model with mouse heads suspended from four rods situated around the top column of the post. Since the top column detaches from the bottom, we've decided to put a servo on the top column so it could rotate upon activation:
Next we decided to attach a servo to a dowel that we picked up from Home Depot. Our plan is to mount it to the top of the post and attach the feather toy with some string so the servo can mimic the action of pulling the line up and down to draw the cat ’s attention. Here’s the servo with the rod in action:
And finally we're thinking that we'd like to have a glowing LED ball that attracts the cat's attention while NOT electrocuting him/her. I made a protype of the glow ball and here's a video of it working here:
We’re still quite a ways from completion. We’re in the process of building a housing for the servos, and trying to figure out the triggering mechanism for the project. Sadly, it probably won’t be a web-based one, because after looking over the TweetMobile code, we both realized that we just don’t have enough programming experience to figure out how to adapt it for our purposes. Right now we’re looking into activating it through a radio transmitter/receiver set-up.
No comments:
Post a Comment