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Espruino is a JavaScript interpreter for low-power Microcontrollers. This site is both a support community for Espruino and a place to share what you are working on.
@enaon
Hello Gordon,
there are some ready made products, but they all use a quite bigger ball and the whole cat enters inside, there is not a ball based one that half the cat is outside. I think most if not all are not really cleaning/maintaining friendly machines for a toilet use, some are ok, some are really bad designs, I am proud on how simple/clean this implementation turned out to be. It is battery/mains powered, 6 months of 10 emptying cycles per day is my estimate on 8 18650 batteries, but I will know for real after I run some test during this weekend, and is basically water proof.
the dsd6 has the serial on the usb, it turned out that I can controll 2 servos, 2 relays and the powerbank using just those two pins, so I did not opened it up, it is a standard dsd6. I went for the dsd6 because there were many problems to solve, I wanted the controller to be really simple in the first go, the dsd6 and espruino made the controlling part a breeze. I made a custom lock that also transfers vibrations from the ball to the dsd6, so the accel is working fine for cat presence, I am using the tap feature of the accelerometer at 2g force sensing, every trigger resets the 2 minutes counter. I also monitor voltage drop during the emptying cycle, I found out that I can relate drop to sand weight quite well, so it knows how much sand is in the ball, and this also serves as a "something went wrong" alert. I also run the dsd6 power in through a reed switch that is disabled when the drawer is missing, so it has drawer presence sensor , 5 volts is power on, 0.6 volts is power off( powerbank in sleep mode, 30μA drain), 0 volts is drawer out.
Yes, it is just cardboard, two component thin liquid construction resin, it soaks in the cardboard well, filling and sanding. The resulting material feels a bit like poly-carbonate sheets, very nice for prototyping I think, it was my first try using this technique, I recommend it. My comment on the "not the strong point" was about my coding skills, other that this espuino is rock solid, as it has always been for me, a true tool.
I have some photos of the "making of" in this greek forum, I will be happy if you care to have a look.
Thank you again for espruino, happy new year.
https://www.phorum.com.gr/viewtopic.php?t=50568&start=75
ps, this is maybe the best product on the market, but it really served as a reason to make something more cleaning friendly, I do not like it, it is not bad but it is not good either, the scoop part is not even removable, there is no way to really wipe clean the sand pocket, I am not sure the people in the cat litter robots business really have cats.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yy1eG_oyeGU