Cat Communicator

So during the holidays we had to leave Jack alone (apart from neighbours and cat-sitter). And of course we wanted to check in with him from time to time to see how he is doing.
So I got a cheap Webcam and a very old Aspire Aspire One 150D (I painted It red at some stage... ). Lubuntu running on it btw..

First I had to open up the Webcam and disable the LEDs. I had no way of switching them off with Linux. And by disabling I mean just cutting them off.. ;)

Next step: Hook up two 2€ servos and a bit off leftover wood.

And the whole thing from the other side.. took like 5min...

Since it tends to be a bit dark in Hamburg sometimes there is also an LED from an old torch:

The LED works fine directly on the Arduino pin which was a bit unexpected.
I don't need to write about the Servo libraries for Arduino.

To communicate I use Skype (no need for dyndns, there is an IP grabber)
You have to set Skype to auto accept calls.
And to communicate with Arduino I just log in to the shell via ssh.

Commands to the Arduino with:

echo "command" > "your ard e.g. /dev/ttyACM0"

Careful! The Arduino reset needs to be disabled in order to use the echo command:










The whole setup:

And a screen-shot from a Skype session during the holidays:

I know... he was a bit confused...