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Vol. 22: Kitty Twitty Cat Toy

Craft a cheery cat toy that sends tweets to update the world with your pet's activities.

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+ Downloads & Extras:

+ Kitty Twitty was designed to be easily hacked, modified, and expanded. With just a few extra lines of code, and a sensor or two, you can Tweet just about anything you want! Here are some ideas to get you started. Let me know in the comments which are your favorites. Thanks!

• Add a pressure sensor to a food bowl - Tweet when you cat is hungy...nom, nom, nom.
• Use an ultra sonic sensor to detect movement in a room
• Add a pressure sensor to your cat's bed - Lazy kitty alert!
• A microphone could alert you to a meow or crash of a crazy kitty.
• Environmental sensors - Is your kitty cold? Too dark? Not dark enough?

Kitty Twitty was designed for a cat, but it can easily be converted to work with any pet. Don't have a pet? That's OK, make a twittering home monitoring system, or tweet the weather. The possibilities are endless. Want to learn more about programming the Arduino? Here are some of my Arduino 101 tutorials to get you started: Here is my How-to Tuesday: Arduino 101 blink an LED. If you are new to the Arduino platform, you might want to start here. In just a few minutes you will we be up and running. It's really easy! Here is another simple primer on how to use a standard button with the Arduino. This is very similar technique to the trigger on Kitty Twitty. Once you understand how a button works, you can easily add more "triggers" to your Kitty Twitty. Adding an ultra-sonic sensor to Kitty Twitty is really easy too! Now you can detect movement in a room. Here is a how you can hook up a simple pressure sensor to an Arduino. Want more information? Check out these links:

General Arduino information:

• Arduino website - link
• Getting started - link
• More about the Arduino hardware - link
• A great resource for learning - link
• Code reference - link
• Arduino archives from makezine.com - link

+ Papercraft bird costumes

(PDF)

+ Source code