CAT: Continuous Attention Toy

Working Toy!

Inspiration

This semester, I’ve been really stressed, and as a result, I haven’t been able to spend as much quality time with my cat. As we all know, cats require much more attention than the average person would expect.

What it does

The CAT is a rotating, all-in-one, technologically-advanced cat toy to cure you and your cat of pandemic woes. In addition, it will absolve the owner of guilt when they have to attend Zoom meetings that are not cat-friendly since the cat will be entertained in the meantime.

Features:

Spinning stick with mouse & parrot suspended from ends
Changes speed depending on lighting conditions (ie my book's distance to the photoresistor)
Changes direction upon button press
LCD monitor either a) prints number of seconds since last button press and prompts owner to press the button periodically every 10 s b) displays current speed of the motor

How we built it

ATmega328p
16x2 LCD display
12V DC motor
photoresistor
button
my last 3 brain cells

Challenges we ran into

Servo Motor vs. DC Motor: Originally attempted this project with a servo motor, which definitely did not have the power nor speed needed to drive the spinning stick. Rewrote code for a DC motor (borrowed from another professor's lab) before acquiring another motor off of Amazon, which I modded by hot-gluing a wooden stick to it.
LCD Display: Countless issues with existing libraries, so I ended up writing my own 4-bit LCD library. Works wonderfully now!