Maneki Neko: Lucky Cat with a Laser

RE: Maneki Neko: Lucky Cat with a Laser

genebren — Sat, 16 Apr 2022 21:21:36 GMT

Great project and a very creative way to generate servo control signals. Your servo tester schematic, using the triangle-wave/comparator, is a very classic approach to PWM. Many years ago, the company that I was working with had these huge PCB that would have several of these similar circuits (built out of discrete components). The first time I found a single IC that contained all of this functionality I nearly lost my mind. I quickly built up a replacement PCB that contained all of the same functionality, but was about 1/20 of the size.

Well done and very fun!

RE: Maneki Neko: Lucky Cat with a Laser

rsjawale24 — Sat, 16 Apr 2022 19:59:22 GMT

That's a fun project with opamps!

RE: Maneki Neko: Lucky Cat with a Laser

beacon_dave — Sat, 16 Apr 2022 19:45:48 GMT

Another purrrfect project there.

If you ever went down the microcontroller route then I wonder if it would be possible to fit a couple of small oscillating mirrors into the paws and move the laser source to say one eye. By bouncing the laser beam off the two mirrors held in the raised paws then you could quickly deflect the beam in X and Y axis and be able to project vector-based images (of cats of course).

RE: Maneki Neko: Lucky Cat with a Laser

DAB — Sat, 16 Apr 2022 18:58:00 GMT

Fun project well written.

RE: Maneki Neko: Lucky Cat with a Laser

shabaz — Sat, 16 Apr 2022 17:41:18 GMT

Hi Frank,

Really nice project! Beautiful construction inside-and-out. The multi-board design was really good for that cube base.

Awesome results too : )

RE: Maneki Neko: Lucky Cat with a Laser

javagoza — Sat, 16 Apr 2022 09:19:55 GMT

Great project [mention:cff82ed12b714001a1ba5205f2cb553c:e9ed411860ed4f2ba0265705b8793d05] . Thanks for sharing all your designs and references, they are helping me a lot to learn and try to build something that works for the competition.

I love the idea of the cat, it draws attention and makes you smile.

As a Spanish speaker I have trouble differentiating the pronunciation between "cut" and "cat" so "Lucky cat with Laser" became "Lucky cut with Laser" in my head. And that terrified me at first. [emoticon:752f32bcc91d4a448db162742a877a4a]