When you have three cats and three humans, you have one problem: feeding them on a schedule without over or under feeding them. Even if there was only one human in the equation, the Cat-o-Matic 3000 would still be a useful tool.
Essentially, it’s a traffic light for cats — where green means you are go for feeding, and red means the cat was just fed. Yellow, of course, means the cat is either half-full or half-empty, depending on your outlook.
The brains of this operation is an ATmega88PA leftover from another project. There’s a no-name voltage regulator that steps up the two AA cells to 5 volts. Timing comes from a 32 kHz crystal that allows the microcontroller to stay in power-saving sleep mode for long periods of time.
Creator [0xCAFEAFFE] says the firmware was cobbled together from other projects. Essentially, it wakes up once per second to increment the uptime counter and then goes back to sleep. Short-pressing a button shows the feeding status, and long-pressing it will reset the timer.
Wanna make a cat status indicator without electronics? Give flexures a try.
This is not the real “Cat-o-Matic”, colinfurze made the real one a while ago and It also involved cats and cat-food.
This doesn’t involve cats or catfood?
It’s just a timer with a cat statue
It’s only a matter of time before they figure it out! While pressing the buttons only delays the next feeding time, don’t be surprised if you find it inexplicably has a different crystal or different software after everybody has been out of the house for a while!
Had a similar problem at my house. Although it was a 1 cat 3 human problem. I ended up making a magnetic fridge clock that we’d set every time someone feeds the cat. I uploaded the design to Thingiverse:
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6105645
I ended up having pucks 3D printed with FED on one side and NOT FED on the other. Color coded to each cat (the Calico puck has ears and a tail which I painted to match her).
Since cats don’t have thumbs, they can’t pick them up and flip them over.
When feeding time has unequivocally passed, you grab the entire stack and flip them over.
We just wait until they get really friendly like then the next member up gets to feed them…
If I am at home like on the weekends I pull my bad dad joke and say “feed them to what”
2 cats and 2 adults, 0 prpblems. Bc: each cat has its own electronic feeder with dry food which are activated by the chip of the specific cat. They can eat whenever they want and can’t steal the food of the other. Cats are very good at dosing the food they need andere spread it during the day (unless it tastes too good like wet food).
Wet food they get in the evening at the same time daily. Very simple: if the trays are there and some of the food is lying next to it ;), they have been fed ! Next mornings the trays for the wet food are removed.
Even the kids love preparing the wet food for the cats, making life a little bit easier for us the parents :).
While this project is simple, anyone noticed how nice the design of the 3D printed casing is ?