Pets – we love them, you love them, your friends love them. So why not give a gift made just for them? If you don’t or can’t have a pet, we’ve included a few make-your-own cyber pet options. We’re sure the pet lover in your life will be as happy with these projects as we are!
SMS Texting Pet Food Dish: Is checking and filling your pet food dish a constant daily chore? Have you ever wished you could be notified on your phone when the dish is empty? With this project you’ll learn how to build a pet food dish that does exactly that by sending an SMS text message when the dish is empty! This is way better than giving your pet a smartphone: our cat MOSFET ran up a huge texting bill and then refused to pay it.
This project is a great example of using an Arduino, CC3000 Wi-Fi module, and the Amazon Simple Notification Service to send notifications such as text messages. You can even use the knowledge and code from this project to add notification capabilities to your own Arduino projects!
With a classic guide like this, you can’t go wrong!(read more)
Raspberry Pi Wifi-Controlled Cat Laser Toy: This project will show you how to create a laser toy for your cat which is controlled over the web with a Raspberry Pi. The project demonstrates using a web application to control servos with the Raspberry Pi and an excellent way to keep your cat exercising when you’re umm busy playing minecraft. (read more)
A Sillier Mousetrap: Logging Mouse Data to Adafruit IO with the Raspberry Pi: Mice are cute, but they’re also disgusting, noisy little disease vectors who steal my popcorn and run all over the counters being gross at three in the morning, so I bought some traps.
As it happens, I also just got an Adafruit IO beta account, and I was curious how hard it’d be to automatically log some concrete data about my mouse problem. Despite a few hiccups, it turns out to work pretty well. (read more)
Phone-Activated Talking Dog Collar: Make a bluetooth-activated talking dog collar for Halloween or just to show off at the park! This intermediate electronics project was inspired by Dug from the movie Up– his talking collar translates his thoughts for communicating with humans. Using the Audio FX board and Bluefruit Micro, this project enables you to trigger sound samples through the Bluefruit LE Connect app for iOS and Android. The sounds are played through a mono amp connected to a mini metal speaker.
The collar itself is made from a leather belt, with 3D printed “greebles” to make it look like the collar from the movie.
It’s easy to adapt this circuit for any phone-triggered audio project by swapping out the sound samples! (read more)
GPS Dog Collar: Wonder if you’re giving your dog the exercise she needs? Like electronics? Make your own GPS dog collar!
The progress bar fills up as you stroll around the neighborhood. Set your goal ahead of time and watch the miles rack up. (read more)
Pixy Pet Robot – Color vision follower: This project pairs the super-awsome Pixy CMUCam-5 vision system with the high performance Zumo robot platform, a pan/tilt mechanism and an Arduino Leonardo for a brain.
Putting The Pixy camera and Zumo robot together with an Arduino Leonardo processor, you can build yourself a fun and responsive little bot that will chase objects or follow you around like a playful pet!
The Pixy Pet Robot is simple to build with no soldering required. With just a few common tools, you can complete the assembly in under an hour! (read more)
Really Simple Animatronic Tail: Animatronics is tricky. In addition to the software and electrical engineering of most of our projects, it requires mechanical engineering. Normally when I talk with cosplayers just getting started with electronics, I point them toward a light or sound project, to limit the number of variables.
This project reduces animatronics to its simplest case. Mechanical tails are complex stuff, often involving armatures for bones and cable mechanisms to simulate muscles and tendons. Rather that fighting against gravity, we’ll instead make it our ally. Thinking of the tail as a pendulum, a single small servo and a little math is all it takes. (read more)
Cloud Cam: Internet-Connected Security Camera – The cloud cam is a project to build an internet-connected security camera using a Raspberry Pi and Pi camera. The camera can detect motion and upload images to Dropbox’s cloud storage service, or the beta of Adafruit IO, Adafruit’s internet of things service.
For example build a fancy dashboard to watch and control the lights in a room or keep an eye on your pets and track when they eat, even in the dark! (read more)
Using IFTTT with Adafruit IO to Make an IoT Door Detector: This project will show you how you can use an Adafruit HUZZAH ESP8266 WiFi microcontroller board with a door sensor to email/tweet/text you when your (doggie) door has opened! (read more)
Outside the Adafruit Learning System
Leela Ryan Dog Biscuits: Leela Ryan brings a touch of chic to any dog’s life with organic, all-natural dog biscuits – handmade for the pup in your life! Making a classic treat fit your modern lifestyle, we offer delicious and healthy biscuits that makes dogs beg for more.
We’re excited for the Holiday Season here at Adafruit, and we can’t wait to share that excitement with you! Stay tuned into the blog where you will find new, handpicked gift guides five days a week from November 9th through December 24th, 2015 alongside holiday themed tutorials and builds!
Free Deals
Adafruit offers exciting deals and free items when you shop with us. As of October 13th, 2015 we are currently offering:
- Adafruit Perma-Proto Half-sized Breadboard PCB – Single for order $99 or more
- Adafruit Trinket – Mini Microcontroller – 5V Logic for orders $149 or more
- Adafruit Pro Trinket – 5V 16MHz for order $249 or more
Adafruit Holiday Deadlines 2015
Here are your 2015 shipping deadlines for ordering from Adafruit. Please review our shipping section if you have specific questions on how and where we ship worldwide for this holiday season.
The Adafruit Shipping Department works hard to get your orders out as quickly as we can, but once they’re in the hands of our carriers they’re out of our control.
Carriers have been struggling to keep up with the sharp rise in online orders. UPS, FedEX, and USPS all experienced delivery delays over the last few years.
So all the Adafruit Shippers say: Please be sure you get your gifts early! Order as soon as you can! Once you place your order we’ll ship like the wind!
UPS ground (USA orders): Place orders by Friday 11am ET – December 11, 2015 – There is no guarantee that UPS Ground packages will arrive by December 24.
UPS 3-day (USA orders): Place orders by Thursday 11am ET – December 17, 2015 – Arrive by 12/24/2015.
UPS 2-day (USA orders): Place orders by Friday 11am ET – December 18, 2015 – Arrive by 12/24/2015.
UPS overnight (USA orders): Place orders by Monday 11am ET – December 21, 2015 – Arrive by 12/24/2015.
Please note: We do not offer Saturday or Sunday service for UPS or USPS.
Friday, Dec. 25, 2015, Christmas, no UPS pickup or delivery service.
Friday, Jan. 1, 2016, New Year’s Day, no UPS pickup or delivery service.
United States Postal Service, First Class and Priority (USA orders): Place orders by Friday– December 11, 2014 – Arrive by 12/24/2015 or sooner.
USPS First class mail international (International orders)): Place orders by Friday – November 20, 2015. Can take up to 30 days or more with worldwide delays and customs. Should arrive by 12/25/2015 or sooner, but not a trackable service and cannot be guaranteed to arrive by 12/24/2015.
USPS Express mail international(International orders): Place orders by Friday – December 5, 2015. Can take up to 15 days or more with worldwide delays and customs. Should arrive by 12/24/2014 or sooner.
Gift Certificates are always available at any time.
When in doubt contact us!
