Best regards

Greg

We have had similar I-Candy issues too, our cherry pushchair we bought from a retailer who shut down soon after, another retailer took over the guarantee etc and as problems arose, rear wheels buckled, chassis twisted, brakes locked, seat unit stuck and was unable to remedy, I -Candy eventually agreed to look at it, after speaking numerously to the director who talks and does nothing, we did get a complete new pushchair as they condemned the original (less than 6 months old), within a month it started again, same issues, although the director insisted that the chassis was a new style as they had “issues” with the old one! What a load of cobblers! the complete range is sub-standard and they just do not want to know. They blame misuse and told me to get an independent test done and they would see what the outcome would be. These death traps need to be remedied. My daughter was very nearly seriously hurt whilst in the cherry and all I-Candy wanted to know about was, were there any witnesses and was medical treatment required as “people say things for compensation”, our retailer takes sides with I-Candy, but on the last count we insisted that we had a pushchair whilst they took their time looking at our pushchair, they gave us a peach pushchair, this even had similar issues and we refused to use it! I have given up until now with I-Candy, and have just bought a 3 wheeler for less than £100 which is twice the quality and no issues. my advise to anyone else is fight I-Candy or go to the local scrap yard! Has anyone managed to get a refund from I-Candy?

That should be simple using my original circuit and fitting the batteries

—battery-transistor in place of switch–

So the batteries power the transistor instead of the 5v rail.

The arduino code will need some rewriting but basically you set the pin high when you want the sensor to work (“office hours”) and low when you don’t want it to work (“closed period”).

You would still need to trigger the sensor manually to get the treats.

If my understanding is completely wrong I am happy to look at what you are trying and help in any way I can.

Best regards

Greg

Completely by chance I picked one of these up and plan to do a similar thing and found your article!

I’m actually just trying to get the Arduino to act the manual switch on the dispenser itself, so that I can activate it but still have the requirement to activate the sensor.

I was hoping I could achieve this simply by hooking up the internal switch to a digital pinout and ground on the Arduino… but having tried that and a number of approaches I’ve had no luck. Would you mind sharing how you might approach doing that? I’ve tried using both a transistor and 4N35 to switch the dispenser’s own circuit but I’m struggling to “debug” the problem any further.

Thanks!

The names stay the same in /dev/serial/by-id/. Use them (e.g., /dev/serial/by-id/usb-Prolific_Technology_Inc._USB_Serial_Controller_if00-port0) instead of the shorthand (e.g., ttyUSB0).