Remote Cat Laser Toy

Overview

This was a fun side project inspired by Adafruit's Cat Laser project. The project was a remote controlled laser pointer that could be moved by looking at the camera and clicking different locations.

Details

The project had a different set of complexities than I had dealt with before. It had a webserver which was responsible for displaying the video feed, calibrating the laser to the video displayed, converting the mouse clicks on the video to the servo coordinates, and communicating the coordinates to the raspberry pi via MQTT. The raspberry pi was responsible for accepting the coordinates then sending them to the servo and projecting a video feed from an attached camera.

The project was written in flask with several exertions to work with MQTT and the video feed.

Summary

What I learned from this project was to descope work. We orginally had some grand plans, which were missed, and eventually we "shipped" with limited functionality. The wisdom of "Doing you job you have well before reaching for the next one", resonated.