My cats like to jump on furniture and shed their fur, which ends up on my clothes. To stop them, I’m using a Monkey Couch Guardian. I made it from one of those old-fashioned cymbal-banging toy monkeys, modified with an inexpensive Arduino microcontroller and a proximity sensor. Now when a cat jumps on a table, couch, or bed, the Monkey Couch Guardian makes lots of noise, encouraging the cat to seek a quieter resting place.
I’ll show you how to make a simple PIR (passive infrared) sensor circuit to attach to a battery-powered, cymbal-banging monkey. You can use anything you like for an enclosure for the circuit. (I think a cigar box does nicely.)
HI
Thanks for this Project , I ask about any picture for clamping diode & the number of the diode ?
Hi Michael,
Thanks for this information. Could you provide a schematic for this?
— Mark
I thought the Uno was rated for 40 mA / pin.
The schematic for a relay and an Arduino was previously published here on MAKEZine:
http://blog.makezine.com/2009/02/02/connecting-a-relay-to-arduino/
Using this circuit, I activated the relay once a second with the monkey attached and after 4 hours (over 14,000 cycles) it was still working just fine.
That is luck, or a combination of luck and the fortuitous presence of the LED on pin13 acting as a snubber – normally using a relay without a free-wheel diode you fry your Arduino pin or worse – does anyone vet these designs for basic circuit knowledge?
Good idea. I would make a few changes to the design.
1. Use Attiny85 instead of UNO.
2. Instead of Relay, use a power transistor.
3. Use only one power 4.5v (3AA batteries) source to power both monkey and controller.
Thanks for the idea. I used this trigger our Halloween doorbell from a sensor. I have posted pics of it here – http://warezak.wordpress.com/
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Very clever! I packed a $8 “trinket” mini-Arduino and the other parts into a very small clear plastic box with terminals on the back so that the motion sensor can control projects besides possessed monkeys. I told the board’s LED to flash briefly when the PIR sensor is waiting, turn on while the relay fires, and dim during the wait period. My hound is suitably discouraged, though I think many dogs would simply murder the monkey.
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