The Sphinx
I spoil my cats. That's no secret. Well, I spoil all of my pets of which there have been many over the past 30 years. I currently have two kitties and a snake. I have a 16-month female, Mama, I've had since she was 2 months old and a 2-year-old male, Greyson, I adopted 3-months ago so Mama could have a playmate while I was busy and not able to play. Instead of solving my guilt for not being available and playful enough for Mama's needs, Greyson has insatiable energy and always wants to play even through exhaustion and struggling to breathe... so it wasn't hard to come up with an idea for this week's assignment to use our Arduino to craft something. A cat toy that would turn on when it sensed my cat nearby was at the top of my list of ideas. My other idea was to create a device that could tell me with a beep, when my pot of water had reached a boil, (see below) but it was getting cumbersome to figure out material properties and it would be a clunky prototype... and I loved the cat toy idea.
The pyramidal shape was the result of wanting to create a structure with a wider base to help weigh down the device and then I thought it would provide adequate space to store and hide the electronics. I quickly thought that the name "The Sphinx" would be fitting and that out the top of the pyramid I'd use a servo motor to swing a flimsy metal wire toy with some attractive furry ball or bell on the end, as this is the design of their favorite toy.
Coding the Arduino: I asked Dan for advice on this front as he made his "stud finder" using similar devices I'd plan to use. He shared this link, which allowed me to easily edit the code such that the servo motor would turn on for 8 sweeps if the ultrasonic sensor detected something (my cat) within 40cm. The sensor pulses were set to be delayed by 5 seconds and if the sensor detected nothing the servo motor would do nothing. Setting up the Arduino, sensor, and breadboard was very straight forward.
Building the pyramid was not difficult but just took some time since I was a little OCD with building levels and holders for each electronic part and wanted easy access to the USB Jack.
I was pretty happy with what I produced for my prototype and even took it home to beta test The Sphinx with my cats; who were at first- very suspicious of it. Eventually Greyson started to swing at the toy but I did notice they were very curious of the USB wire and Greyson tried to chew on the wire and servo motor. I also think that setting up multiple sensors on three of the four sides of the pyramid would be better.