Feedback for automated water and food pet dispensers

pet-food-and-water-automation

[Enrico] figured out a way to fully automate his pet food and water. The system is in two parts, the water trough as seen on the left, and the food dispenser whose control hardware is shown on the right. The system is even hooked up to the network so that he can make sure it didn't break down while he was away. The water dispenser uses parts from a sprinkler system. Since it's mounted outdoors … [Read more...]

Hacking dog collars to save money on batteries.

hack dog collar

[Lou] sent in this amazingly simple hack that has been saving him money on special batteries for his dog collar. He uses an invisible fence system which gives the dog a shock if it passes beyond certain markers in his yard. The collars use special batteries so you're not strapping multiple full sized cells to your dogs neck. This is especially necessary when you have a smaller dog that doesn't … [Read more...]

Recreating the Commodore PET with an FPGA

commodore_pet_fpga_clone

[Thomas’] love affair with Commodore computers spans well over 30 years, and not too long ago he decided to recreate one of his favorite Commodore offerings, the PET. As we have seen with similar undertakings, this sort of project is no easy task, but [Thomas] seems to be making his way along nicely. Using a Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA on the Digilent Nexys3 dev board, he has implemented the Pet in … [Read more...]

Internet enabled cat feeder

catfeeder-sm

When travelling, it can always be a pain to have your cats cared for. There are some commercial automated solutions out there, but they tend to be pricey, especially when there are two required. These two cats don't need to worry though. They have an internet enabled monster of a system. The system used is pretty unique. They wanted internet connected relays, but didn't want to put an entire … [Read more...]

CATaLOG: RFID cat tracking

rfidcats

Like many pet owners, [Pete] was curious about his little furry friend's habits while he was gone. He decided to build an RFID tracking system to monitor their positions. This data would then be available on the web.  An Arduino handles the communication of the data, both to twitter and his personal cat tracking site. We were a bit surprised to see that the only data transmitted on the final … [Read more...]