It was only a matter of time. Everything else is getting its data logged and reported to the Internet for detailed analysis, so why should our rodents be any different? The cover story is that [Nicole Horward] hooked her pet hamster Harold up to the web because she wanted to see if he was getting as much exercise as he should. The real reason is, of course, that Harold wanted to show off to his “friends” on Hamsterbook.
The hardware side of this hack is very simple, a magnetic door sensor (like the kind used in alarm systems) is used to detect each time the wheel makes a complete rotation. The sensor is hooked up to the GPIO pins of a Raspberry Pi, where it’s read by a Python script. A small LCD screen was added to give some visual feedback on Harold’s daily activity, and the whole thing was boxed up in a laser cut enclosure.
That gave [Nicole] a cute little display next to Harold’s cage, but it didn’t do much for analyzing his activity. For that, a script is used to upload the data every minute to a ThingSpeak channel via MQTT. This automatically generates attractive graphs from the raw data, making it much easier to visualize what’s happening over the long term.
Now might be a good time to brush up on your MQTT knowledge, so that your pet could be the next to join the IoT revolution.
Cats would be much simpler. Flatline for 23.5 hours and mad racing around for the rest. Usually in the middle of the night.
https://hackaday.com/2016/03/20/exercise-wheel-tracks-kittys-fitness-goals/
“It was only a matter of time. Everything else is getting its data logged and reported to the Internet for detailed analysis, so why should our rodents be any different? ”
Admins have been logging since web servers were a thing. Marketers realized the gold mine they’ve been throwing away.
I have the feeling that the RPi is a massive overkill for the task at hand here. A much more economic ESP8266 could have done the job for a couple of bucks. Regardless of that, is still a very interesting project.
https://hackaday.com/2017/05/27/esp32-hamster-wheel-tracker-tweets-workout-stats/
I thought of the same article. Sadly, that hamster passed away =(
Earlier today i saw a vanity mirror with Bluetooth. Now this… the world has gone mad.
Gotta be up there with the Bluetooth Toothbrush
https://www.oralb.com.au/en-au/product-collections/bluetooth