Category Archives: PIR sensor

Wake Up! The Cat Came Back!

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In order to get the most out of the batteries connected to your microcontroller, you’ll probably need to put it to sleep, the deeper the better. [Rgrokett] was curious about the nighttime habits of his cat, and came up with a nice little hack to get more battery life out of the ESP8266 that he was using.

[rgrokett]’s cat enters and leaves through a cat-door. He figured a PIR sensor would let him know when there was movement around the door. He could then tell if the cat was around. Leaving the PIR sensor and the ESP8266 microcontroller (an Adafruit …read more

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Red Dwarf’s Talkie Toaster Tests Tolerance

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In the Red Dwarf TV series, Talkie Toaster wants to know if you want toast, and if not toast, then maybe a muffin or waffle, and it will pester you incessantly until you smash it with a 14lb lump hammer and throw it in a waste disposal. Now [slider2732] has actually gone and made one of the infernal machines!

He’s hidden a PIR sensor in the toaster handle to tell an Arduino Pro Mini when someone is unfortunate enough to be passing by. The Arduino then reads sound files from an SD card reader and plays them through a 3 …read more

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