This week we had to complete your final project and tracking your progress.
Main goal was to build a litterbox, that detects the cat, has some sort of cleaning mechanism, measures data and sends it.
Except for the cleaning system, everything works, sometimes better sometimes worse.
The motor that drive the strainer is, at the moment, to weak, so it will skip steps, when there is to much litter.
The loadcell needs some calibration but it works in general and the app needs to be programmed, so that the bluetooth-data can be recieved and visualized.
What's working::
- Detect, when a cat enters and leaves
- Look the door to prevent the cat from entering, while cleaning
- Move the strainer system
- read data from the loadcell
- save the data to a sd-card
- send out data via bluetooth
What's not working:
- cleaning the litterbox. At the moment, the motors are to weak to realy move the litter or things inside...
- Persistend data from the loadcell. I can read data from the loadcell, but after a couple of minutes the data will be far away from what it should be..
- The RTC-Module.. Due to the original RTC-Modul not working I sourced a new one, which needed a conntetion more than bevore. Therefore the module does not work.
- The App, because there is none.
This one is easy: will my cats use it?
Since Cats don't like changes, it could be difficult to get them to use the new litterbox, after everything was fixed and is working^^.
In the current version of my system the worst that could happen would be a power outage while a cat is inside...
The steppermotor, which is used for holding the strainer at 90° would get no power and loses it's position, resulting in a cat that gets hit by the strainer.
The strainer is light weight, so the cat cab't be harmed, but they will be shocked and maybe refuses to use the litterbox afterwards...
Over the last weeks I've learned a lot!
The hole electronics-productions was very new for me, also the cnc-milling topic was something, I haven't used often bevore.
Which I learned the most is that, for my next bigger project, I have to work on my time-management!!! Many things were done on the last minute, resulting in a lot of stress and bad mood...
But nevertheless I liked it a lot, and that's what counts :)