Category Archives: automated

Cat vs. Human Escalates with Armor-Plated Feeder

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Wars generally increase innovation as the opposing sides try to kill each other in ever more efficient ways. Even the soft war waged daily between felines and their human servants results in innovation, to wit we offer this armor-plated automated cat feeder.

The conflict between [Sprocket H.G. Shopcat] and her human [Quinn Dunki] began with a thoughtfully provided automatic food dispenser. Like human vending machine customers who witness a just-purchased bag of Cheesy Poofs dangling on the end of the dispense auger, [Sprocket] learned that the feeder would dispense a few fishy nuggets when nudged. [Quinn] embarked on an iterative …read more

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Sandwich Robot Keeps You Fed So You Can Keep Hacking

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Food. A necessary — often delicious — interruption of whatever project you’re currently hacking away at. Ordering takeout gets expensive and it’s generally unhealthy to subsist solely on pizza. With the Sandwich-O-Matic, a simple voice command fulfills this biological need with minimal disturbance of your build time.

Built for a thirty-six hour hackathon, the Sandwich-O-Matic is controlled by a Photon and an Arduino. The backend is running node, hosted on AWS, and Google Cloud was used for voice to text recognition. This thing is a fully automated and voice controlled sandwich building station. A DC motor services the toaster, while …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Coffee Machine Grows In Complexity With No Sign Of Stopping

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In Star Trek, there is a race of cyborgs with a drive to slowly assimilate all sentient life. Their aesthetic is not far off from the one [Ronald]’s ever expanding coffee machine is taking on. One has to wonder, what dark purpose would bring the Borg into existence? Where did they start? If [Ronald] doesn’t get a satisfying cup of coffee soon, we may find out.

We covered the first iteration of his brewing machine in 2013. We like to imagine that he’s spent many sleepless, heavily caffeinated days and nights since then to arrive at version 2. This version …read more

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CNC Upgrade to Guitar Pickup Winding Machine

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The idea of winding inductive guitar pickups by hand is almost unthinkable. It uses extremely thin wire and is a repetitive, laborious process that nevertheless requires a certain amount of precision. It’s a prime candidate for automation, and while [Davide Gironi] did exactly that, he wasn’t entirely satisfied with his earlier version. He now has a new CNC version that is more full-featured and uses an ATMega8 microcontroller.

[Davide Gironi]’s previous version took care of winding and counting the number of turns, but it was still an assisted manual system that relied on a human operator. The new upgrade includes …read more

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Fingerprint Garage Door Won’t Open Every Time A Neighbor Microwaves a Burrito

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With three kids, including himself, [Dave] faced the very real likelihood of someone absent-mindedly leaving the garage door open and being robbed blind. Rather than installing some plebeian solution, he compiled a feature list. And what a feature list it is!

The garage door needed to notify him of its status with strategically placed LEDs around the house, and give him full control on his devices. He wanted to open and close it using his existing key-code entry system. Lastly, it would be extra-cool if he could add some biometrics to it; in this case, a fingerprint sensor.

The core …read more

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