Collaborate Disseminate
Some of us here at Hackaday are cat lovers, but we also understand that a plethora of unwanted cats using a suburban back garden can be bothersome, and a few years ago we featured a project from Aussie YouTuber [Craig Turner], in which he created a motion-detecting water spray for …read more
Continue reading In This Aussie’s Back Yard, No Cat Is Safe From An Automated Soaking!
Your feline friend understands that it has a name, and it knows when you use it, new research has found. Continue reading Cats Actually Understand When You Say Their Name, Study Finds
A feline’s appetite is rarely sated, and cat owners around the world are routinely treated to an early morning wake up call to remind them of this fact. To solve this problem, many turn to automated feeders. However, such devices usually handle only dry foods, with a simple hopper system. …read more
Continue reading Auotmated Cat Feeder Handles Wet Food With Aplomb
Most humans take a year to learn their first steps, and they are notoriously clumsy. [Hartvik Line] taught a robotic cat to walk [YouTube link] in less time, but this cat had a couple advantages over a pre-toddler. The first advantage was that it had four legs, while the second came from a machine learning technique called genetic algorithms that surpassed human fine-tuning in two hours. That’s a pretty good benchmark.
The robot itself is an impressive piece inspired by robots at EPFL, a research institute in Switzerland. All that Swiss engineering is not easy for one person to program, …read more
Have you ever looked at your cat and thought “You know, my kitten really needs an electric skateboard!” Probably not, but this seems to have happened to [Kim Pimmel] while looking at his cat MIDI, so he decided to build one. This process involved building a simple, low powered skateboard with a Feather mainboard and motor controller combined with a laser-cut switch mechanism. When [Kim] puts a treat into the mechanism, the cat pulls the switch and the skateboard moves forward, moving into a brave new e-skateboarding feline future. MIDI looks somewhat unimpressed by this whole business, but I suspect …read more
The first thing to notice about [Bijuo]’s cat-sized quadruped robot designs (link is in Korean, Google translation here) is how slim and sleek the legs are. That’s because unlike most legged robots, the limbs themselves don’t contain any motors. Instead, the motors are in the main body, with one driving a half-circle pulley while another moves the limb as a whole. Power is transferred by a cable acting as a tendon and is offset by spring tension in the joints. The result is light, slim legs that lift and move in a remarkable gait.
[Bijuo] credits the Cheetah_Cub project as …read more
Continue reading Cat Robot’s Secret to Slim Legs? Banish the Motors!
The CatGenie is an amazing device to watch in action, basically a self-cleaning litter box for cats that even does away with the need to replace the litter. It’s comparable to what the indoor flush toilet is for humans compared to maintaining a composting toilet. However, there is a problem. It uses costly soap cartridges which have to be replaced because an RFID reader and a usage counter prevent you from simply refilling them yourself.
[David Hamp-Gonsalves] reverse engineered the electronics so that he didn’t have to pay for the cartridges anymore. This has been done before and one of …read more
Continue reading Doing Logic Analysis To Get Around The CatGenie’s DRM
The CatGenie is an amazing device to watch in action, basically a self-cleaning litter box for cats that even does away with the need to replace the litter. It’s comparable to what the indoor flush toilet is for humans compared to maintaining a composting toilet. However, there is a problem. It uses costly soap cartridges which have to be replaced because an RFID reader and a usage counter prevent you from simply refilling them yourself.
[David Hamp-Gonsalves] reverse engineered the electronics so that he didn’t have to pay for the cartridges anymore. This has been done before and one of …read more
Continue reading Doing Logic Analysis To Get Around The CatGenie’s DRM
Where the Hackaday Cat goes when she steps over the threshold into the wider world is a mystery, she reveals her whereabouts strictly on her terms and would we suspect be very cagey were we able to ask her about it. [Andy C] however has a need to know where his cat is spending her time, so he’s made a GPS collar for a bit of feline spying.
There are commercial GPS collars for pets, but they all share the flaw of extremely limited battery life. His challenge then was to create a collar that delivered the required pinpoint fix …read more
Continue reading Where’s The Cat? Locating Your Moggy Without Eating Batteries
Human brains evolved to pay extra attention to anything that resembles a face. (Scientific term: “facial pareidolia”) [Rongzhong Li] built a robot sensor array with multiple emitters and receivers augmenting a Raspberry Pi camera in the center. When he looked at his sensor array, he saw the face of a cat looking back at him. This started his years-long Petoi OpenCat project to build a feline-inspired body to go with the face.
While the name of the project signals [Rhongzhong]’s eventual intention, he has yet to release project details to the open-source community. But by reading his project page and …read more
Continue reading The Sensor Array That Grew Into a Robot Cat