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Not Quite Normal

Adding access control to CATaLOG June 24

In the past few weeks we've been having problems with another cat coming into the house. Rather than invest in a magnetic catflap for £30, I bought a standard RC servo from Heliguy (excellent service btw - free delivery and arrived the next day) for £7 and added it to CATaLOG.

The video below shows it in operation.


The servo is connected to pin 9 of the Arduino, one of two pins which are capable of PWM output without affecting other code, and uses the basic servo library to turn the servo 180 degrees, wait a few seconds, and then turn it back

In the video I push Tuffin's manual in/out button to trigger the servo - in the live code the servo only operates when it detects Bobbin or Tuffin via the RFID reader. The lights you see flashing are the ethernet interface activity lights attempting to send a tweet and update the status :)

It needs a few tweaks to make it completely reliable (don't want the cats getting locked out!), but once it is I'll add a section to the project pages with more details.