I have spent the last several weeks building a device to automatically dispense dry food to our two adorable cats. The cats need to be ona diet due to weight issues. So a certain amount of food must be given to them throughout the day. i learned about the Arduino board soon before starting this project. So this little hobby has given me the perfect opportunity to learn more about this amazing device and its ever-expanding capabilities. The cat feeder is basically a cylindrical container that has an opening on its side. The cylinder rests on its side and is supported by wooden dowles and rollerblade ballbearings which allow it to rotate with ease. The rotation is provided by a wheel attached to a small motor. the signal and power is provided by an Arduino Duemilanove. When the cylinder spins, the opening allows food to fall off when the opening faces down. A funnel system then drives the food to a Y type PVD junction which distributes the food evenly to two bowls. Since the food is dis...
This is a basic of exploration of how I can now monitor my home's electricity consumption cost in real-time. There are many solutions to this problem. Some are more complicated than others. I needed to create a solution that did not involve any manipulation of my electric panel simply because I know very little about electrical work and did not want to mess around with high power. Ultimately I found Avatar-X's electric meter reader project . This is, in my opinion, the most elegant and unobtrusive way of obtaining the information I needed. He was gracious enough to share his wonderful code that converts the data received from the Arduino into real-time costs. In fact, most of my code comes directly from him. I just tweaked it for my own needs. Thanks again Av! Like Av's setup, my electric meter has an infrared LED that blinks each time a KW of electricity is used. I placed an infrared photoresisitor directly in front of this LED ready to ...
Just finished building a medium scale solar cell array panel to power some small electronics outdoors. Here're some pictures of the construction and the end result: This is a closeup of a solar panel. These are polycarbonate panels that generate about 1.75 watts of power. I got them from this eBay seller http://myworld.ebay.com/rebeccayi0904 A closeup of a 6 panels connected in serial. The multimeter reads 3.20 volts. I was getting an average of 3.1 volts on a sunny day. When it's cloudy the voltage did not drop very noticeably, but the amps did fall quite rapidly. A closer look at how the panels are connected. These are the "buses" that transmit the electricity from one panel to the next. The front side of the panel is the negative and the back side is the positive. The final product. Sorry for the lousy lighting. I will try to take a better picture later. Total output on a sunny day: about 30 watts and 2.2 amps with 12.2 volts. These results will be dramatically dif...
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