Unlucky Cat (sillyhacks)

We wanted to build a silly, funny project. We wanted to have a lucky cat rotating its arm, we wanted it to puke blue water. Its eyes should blink.

We used a raspberry pi to control the output. Our next plan was scaring the cat with words. There are words that are annoying to programmers. Those are all those bullshit buzzwords, like "AI" and "blockchain" and "cloud". And then there are words we genuininly don't like – "facebook" or "sunlight". When those words are said the cat gets angry. But don't worry: When saying nice things (e.g. "hack") or simply waiting it becomes calm.

We used the raspberry pi os. The program is written in python3. The speech recognition is done with https://pypi.org/project/SpeechRecognition/ and the google recognition method. The LEDs are WS2812 and we used two DC motors one of which has a pump attached.

Our main problem was a hardware limitation of the raspberry pi. We needed pulse width modulation (PWM) for each the motor that controls the arm movement and and the control of the RGB LED. But using PWM is mutually exclusive with using PWM.

Our solution was using Softwware PWM (opposed to hardware PWM) for the motor of the arm and controlling the LEDs with an arduino that communicates with the raspberry pi via the USB port.