Cat Trainer Parts List

Once it’s filled in, we’ll place some orders and then wait for our parts to come.

And, just so there’s something nice to look at, here is a picture of Dakota.

That isn’t the sink we want to keep her away from, but you can see the problem.

Here’s the idea:

There are 2 problems to solve:

1) Is there a cat on the counter?
Well, we can use an infrared proximity sensor like The GP2D12 to find out if something’s on the counter, near the sink, sure.

The subproblem is, is there a human utilizing the counter? We don’t want to scare (ourselves, family, friends) who innocently approach trying to wash a plate.

We detect this case by noticing an object further from the counter than the counter is wide, and if that’s identified, “disarming” until no object is detected.

2) How to remove the cat from the counter.
Ideas here include an air jet, a flashing light, a sound of some kind.
Our first stab at this is to use a CPU fan, with the airstream ducted down (yay cardboard) to get a thinner/faster flow, while also also strobing a super-bright LED behind the spinning fan to cause extra fright-power.

To power on the fan, since the ‘juice’ provided by the Ardunio is not really enough for serious spinning, we can use a low-power solid state relay to switch on/off a separate 12V supply.

For assembling all the controls, we could use a blank protoshield PCB, if we go with the “full” Arduino (like a decimilanovae) ($6), along with the set of headers, ($2).
Link: Protoshield PCB

Since this is intended for a permanent install a new Arduino does need to be purchased; some of the SparkFun options (like the Pro Mini) might be nice but since they don’t have FTDI/USB chips, would need the extra $13 adaptor board to go with.

Taking a hard left in possible direction of this project is the idea of using a “raw” AVR chip instead of an Arduino. Since we’re not using really any of the sophisticated features (all we need are a few binary outputs and one analog input, after all) the Arduino really is overkill. And since you can get ATTiny’s for $1-$5 each, depending on how fancy you want to go, wow, we can make a lot of cool things for not a lot of money.

Here’s a good guide to getting up and running Lady Ada also has a helpful looking tutorial.

Required parts regardless of if we go Arduino or not:
* IR Rangefinder module
* solid state relay (no point using a mechanical relay for 0.15A @ 12VDC)
* Resistor/LED (from parts box)
* Fan and housing for the whole project (cardboard would work for prototyping)
* Smaller prototyping board

If we go pure AVR:
* voltage regulator to power the AVR (It needs 1.8-5.5VDC if we get this one.)
* Programmer from LadyAda
* 12V-ish Wall Wart (cut the plug off and solder into the board)
* The programming cradle
* A socket for whatever AVR we get for it’s permanent home

So this is very much a work in progress — we just wanted to get our initial brainstorming shared for our own use, and thought it’d be worth sharing with you as well.