Hi Folks,
I am looking to put together a cat feeder for my cat who is able to get into all commercial units, my fiancé asked me to put one together and I thought “what a great opportunity to learn about Arduino”. As I have absolutely no experience in electronics (even in school 16ish years ago, I was excluded because of being colour blind so was given essentially a lego kit to assemble). However I would like to be able to store and read data from my green house and other areas of my home potentially in the future. The one constraint is the project needs to be ready to use in about 2 weeks, to allow some testing time to fine tune it, that includes construction of the prototype.
So far I have purchased the Jaycar duinotech experiments kit, with an UNO R3 (type) board and some peripherals to start experimenting. It turns out to be a lot harder than I expected (I’m sure you’ve heard that before), even though I have found something that I pretty much want to copy, the issue is with the coding for the changes.
Here is the link to the video I am using as my base starting point.
The structure will be made out of PVC pipe with acrylic sheets used for the sliding disks, a screw on top, and possible usb mains supply with a battery option. Generally a little more hardwearing, if successful may become the main feeder.
The main change is that I want it to go off automatically every 12 hours, this is the part I need help programming. With a lot of research I have found a board called an RTC that will help with that and I plan on picking one up tomorrow. My issue is with coding the servo motor to listen to the RTC, and the RTC in general. I can get the servo to go off about every 2.4 hours at the moment, but it needs to be a lot more.
I have read a lot about how RTC’s work and it sounds perfect, but looking into the code for them, it’s just, well, code at the moment.
Any help, advice, or support appreciated. Will try and respond to project questions asap.
Kind regards,
Cup