Most of us would agree that kittens are very cute, however require a lot of consideration in return. What would you do when you adopted three deserted cats however didn’t have all day to play with them? [Hoani Bryson] solved his downside by building LazerPaw — an autonomous, protected solution to let your cats chase lasers.
Having just lately tinkered with laptop imaginative and prescient within the type of OpenCV, [Hoani] determined he would make a laser turret for his cats to play with. An infrared digital camera, used in order that the LazerPaw works at the hours of darkness, is mounted to the laser and the Raspberry Pi. These electronics are then mounted on a servo-based pan/tilt module, which is in flip mounted with two smartphone clamps to the ceiling. That means, when the cats chase the laser, they are going to be wanting away from the beam supply. Additionally, if the system is aiming immediately at a cat, the laser is turned off. Finally, [Hoani] added some NeoPixels with an Arduino-based controller for further hacker vibes.
The LazerPaw’s software program takes in a 30 FPS stream from a webcam, scales it down for efficiency, and applies a threshold filter to it. When a black pixel, which is assumed to be a cat, is detected, it “pushes” the digital camera away from it relying on how near the laser it’s. The impact of that is that each time a cat catches as much as the laser, it strikes away once more. The processed photographs are additionally despatched to an interactive web site for distant cat playtime. Finally, there may be additionally a bodily begin button so that you don’t want WiFi to make use of it.
Is your cat extra of a sunbather than a lethal homicide beast? Maybe it’ll like this cat chair that follows the solar.
