Official CIS126 (Computer Architecture & Organization) Final Project by Shane Staret, Trush Patel, and Chris Miller. This project was created through the use of Arduino and Assembly (using Microsoft Visual Studio and the AVR Assembler).
This is a link to my YouTube channel, featuring videos of this project on it. Here is a video of the prototype in action (without the hallway so you can actually see what's going on)
This is a link to the Slack workspace we used to communicate throughout this project. Click here to join it and view what we said and did!
We'd like to thank Professor Robert Moyer for helping us throughout this project.
Our mouse trap does exactly what you would expect it to. The way it works is that there is a ramp leading up to a small hallway with bait within it. Behind this bait is a distance sensor, which we use to detect how close the mouse is to our bait. Cleverly, we placed a trapdoor directly in front of the bait, so once the sensor notices the mouse is over the trapdoor, it quickly opens and then closes. This causes the mouse to fall below into a small and safe area where they can be held until released.
A servo connected to our first Arduino is used to open and close the trapdoor. This Arduino is also responsible for relaying what kind of bait was used to trap the mouse to the second Arduino. The second Arduino keeps track of how many times a particular bait (either peanut butter, beef jerky, or cheese) was effective in trapping a mouse. Once the area the caught mice are held in is full (about after five mice), the second Arduino lights up an LED indicating to the user of the mouse trap that the contraption is full and that the mice need to be released.
The vast majority of our code was created within the Arduino IDE, using C and C++. The code in the Arduino IDE allowed us to connect the two Arduinos together and stored all variables that we needed. The Arduino code also controlled the movement of the servo and the lighting up of the LED. Some of our code was created in Assembly using the AVR Assembler. We created a Lookup table within assembly with data spaces that kept track of how many times a mouse was caught using a specific bait. We also changed the values of the Lookup table within our Assembly code. The data spaces were then referenced in the Arduino code so they could be printed on the console to show what baits were most effective. The Assembly code was also responsible for converting the output of the distance sensor from microseconds to centimeters. Unfortunately, the distance sensor we used only output the amount of time that passed between its initial signal and the rebounded signal it received. This was not useful to us, as we needed to know the distance between the mouse and the sensor, so we used Assembly to convert from microseconds to centimeters.
A picture of the servo and distance sensor connected to a single breadboard so both are dependent on one another
A picture of the final prototype (without the hallway) with text and arrows pointing to the important components of the prototype.
The GIF below shows the prototype in action without the hallway on top so it is easier to see what is going on. Essentially what happens is that as the fake mouse reaches the trapdoor, the distance sensor recognizes that something is close by, prompting the servo to drop the trapdoor and capture the mouse.
