What do cats get up to in the 30 minutes or so a day that they’re awake? Being jerks, at least in our experience. But like many hackers, [Brent] wanted to quantify the activity of his cat, and this instrumented cat exercise wheel was the result.
To pull this off, [Brent] used what he had on hand, which was an M5Stack ESP32 module, a magnetic reed switch, and of course, the cat exercise wheel [Luna] seemed to be in the habit of using at about 4:00 AM daily. The wheel was adorned with a couple of neodymium magnets to trip the reed switch twice per revolution, with the pulse stream measured on one of the GPIOs. The code does a little debouncing of the switch and calculates the cat’s time and distance stats, uploading the data to OpenSearch for analysis and visualization. [Brent] kindly includes the code and the OpenSearch setup in case you want to duplicate this project.
As for results, they’re pretty consistent with what we’ve seen with similar cat-tracking efforts. A histogram of [Luna]’s activity shows that she does indeed hop on the wheel at oh-dark-thirty every day, no doubt in an effort to assassinate [Brent] via sleep deprivation. There’s also another burst of “zoomies” around 6:00 PM. But the rest of the day? Pretty much sleeping.
Cats are the true urban person pet. Look they even use treadmills to get their exercise.
Cats are the true urban pest.
FTFY
Surprisingly many electronics inventors have had pet cats.
We have four restaurants as neighbours. They are quite happy with our two cats, as since they roam the neighbourhood, they have almost no more mice or rats to contend with.
The occasional theft of fish is excused for this otherwise free service.
Dan, your sentiments abouts cats are pretty consistent….
How many cats does your family torture you with?
Poor cat. She should be playing outside.
And eating birds? Tread-ways are proof that our cats need to stay indoors.
Human roommates, tho, are way worse when they do stuff consistently at 4am. believe me! So graded on the curve cats are kinda OK.
Very interesting to see the distance a cat enjoys to run per day to be satisfied. My cats could roam freely and it is something I would have never been able to quantify, unless of course with a GPS logger, but I am against collars on unsupervised animals due to the risk of getting stuck.
Most regular cat collars are designed to come apart so a cat won’t get trapped, I thought.
Definitely. My cat has a GPS tracker and the included collar was breakaway style. He escapes it occasionally so I know it works. The vet will complain if it’s not a breakaway.
We have 4 cats and 3 of them prefer that we do not sleep at night.
I lead a charmed life. If the cat bowls are empty, I’ll wake up in the morning with the 4 cats quietly staring at me.
They’re all probably think “What the hell do we keep you for!?”
Oh, I personally like cats. I just notice a trend in Dan’s remarks concerning them…
There has to be a good story there.
Re: craig
My cat would be scared as all hell when she see’s this threadmill. That said, she does have her few times per day when she goes crazy with energy and runs around the entire house and backyard for 5 minutes. I guess that’s what zoomies are, but why does she then suddenly feels the urge to hang on the door handle of the garage door??
This is exactly what you would expect. Predators, such as cats, do their best work at dawn and dusk. In those periods, both the nocturnal and the diurnal prey are active, doubling the number of potential targets. Dogs are pretty much the same (at least the ones that haven’t had all of their predator instincts bred out of them).
Cats are solar powered, all that basking in patches of light are charging batteries, so they have the energy for the 4 am zoomies.
Another hypothesis posits is that cats are advanced scouts from an invading force. They are cataloging what is important to humans by laying on whatever we are reading, so that they can scan it with a scanner installed in their bellies. Those times that they vanish from a locked apartment, only to saunter an hour later, out of the closet you carefully searched. They used the portal in the back of the closet to return to the cat planet, to download and debrief.
(First “theory” was mine, the second was invented by my late wife)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cat_from_Outer_Space
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That_Darn_Katz!
What’s the theory of magnet placement on something like this. I suppose they are weights so should be balanced.
And I suppose multiple reed switches would be ideal.
Perhaps an RC on the reed switch with a Schmitt trigger would be “gold standard”?
It seems devilish to get a clean signal otherwise.
Is there a layout that works best? I was thinking magnets closer might be ideal rather than a ping per half revolution.
Multiple magnets would improve the measurement in various ways.
But… be careful with multiple magnets on a wheel that is in line with the magnetic field of the earth. When the magnets are placed incorrectly, they might opose the earth magentic field causing the wheel to spin faster and faster until it explodes (that’s why that setup isn’t suited for use as a perpetuum mobile or with your cat inserted into the device). If you think to be smart and place the magnets in the opposite direction than it locks onto the earth magnetic field and it will be impossible to turn (so your cat wouldn’t like that either). The best option therefore would be to alternate the magnets in a N-Z-N-Z-N-Z pattern around the wheel and you’ll be fine.
However, make sure your cat doesn’t have any metal inserts as they eventually will stick to the wheel. Also make sure that sharp cutlery may not be present in a radius of approx. 4-5 feet of the wheel (while in operation). Also be aware that when you have a very active high-speed cat it may cause radio interference or diagonal stripes on your TV screen especially when that screen is a CRT.