We’ve seen a great many cat feeders over the years. Some rely on the Internet of Things, and some rely on fancy microcontrollers. [Larry Cook], on the other hand, built his using a simple 4060 binary counter chip.
The feeder is built out of old plywood, and the whole thing runs off an old 12-volt DC wall wart and a lead-acid battery to keep it going in a power outage. The dry cat food is stored in hopper above a drum, with the drum rotated by a 12-volt DC gearmotor. The gearmotor is activated on a schedule—either every 4 hours, or every 5.5 hours, depending on setting. There’s then a four-digit 7-segment display for counting the total number of feedings.
The manner of operation is simple. The 4060 binary counter slowly counts up to 8,196 on a 1.11 Hz or 0.83 Hz clock, for four hour or 5.5 hour operation respectively. When it hits that threshold, it fires the gear motor. The gear motor then rotates the drum for one revolution, dumping a preset amount of food. At the end of a revolution, it triggers a hall sensor which resets the circuit.
The best thing about this design? It’s been in service for ten years. [Larry’s] original video is a big contrast to his latest one, but it shows the same feeder doing the same job, all this time.
We love a good cat feeder, and it’s great to see one built with simple old-school parts, too. Video after the break.
[Thanks to Cprossu for the tip!]
Good post, but hmm, surely it counts from 0 to 8191, since that’s 1 1111 1111 1111? Wheres 8196 is 10 0000 0000 0100 a very unusual number for a binary counter to count up to.
I built a beeper at a workplace that beeped every 15 minutes with a 4060. It was to track work and was a failure. After about a day of beeps every 15 minutes we all ignored the pulses as we had got used to them and filtered them out. Oh how we laughed.
I remember using a 4060 as a hacked MHz frequency counter. Input to 4060… 4060 to a PC soundcard… Software to onscreen meter.
Good makes, like Phillips will get to 90Mhz. A simple calibration option compensates in case your soundcard xtal is off. The system worked by looking at the period of the divided signal, and calculating the frequency. That way a low frequency input can give high precision, while remaining responsive on the updates.
https://opend.co.za/hardware/freqmeter1/index.htm
I personally loved it because it’s simple, debugging it if anything goes wrong is easy, there’s no microcontroller to lock up, no code for bugs to be hidden in, no servers to go down or fail, no clock to overflow and create a y2k-ish like failure, and let’s face it: This is not a task that requires cesium atomic clock accuracy to perform adequately!
Sure some may call it crude… But it’s elegant, creative, has just enough parts to work, and it i not over-engineered. I love it when a minimalist design works and just keeps working. It reminds me of the old Tech Model Railroad Club’s definition of a hack.
I salute those who have a problem, put something together to solve it, and have it actually work!
Prefect design, keep it simple
It’ll probably run for 50 years without an issue
It will outlast the cat.