2025 Pet Hacks Contest: A Water Fountain For Your Cat

May 25, 2025 by 5 Comments

Part of the charm of having a cat in your life is that by their nature these animals are very interactive. They will tell you in no uncertain terms when something in their lives needs attention, for example when their water dish is empty. But why not give them a drinking fountain all of their own? It’s what [supermarioprof] did for their adorable ginger cat [Piki Piki], providing a cat-operated trickle of water on demand.

It’s a simple enough device in its operation, but very well constructed. There’s a small basin with a drain, and a water cistern valve operated by the cat placing a paw on a lever. This starts a trickle of water, from which they can lap as much as they like.

The physical construction comes courtesy of some laser-cut ply, and what looks like some 3D print work. It’s certainly easy to operate for the cat, and has worked reliably for a few years now.

This project is part of the 2025 Pet Hacks contest, so expect to see more in the same vein. If your cat’s life is improved by one of your projects, consider making an entry yourself!

2025 Hackaday Pet Hacks Contest
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Hackaday Links: May 25, 2025

May 25, 2025 by 24 Comments

Have you heard that author Andy Weir has a new book coming out? Very exciting, we know, and according to a syndicated reading list for Summer 2025, it’s called The Last Algorithm, and it’s a tale of a programmer who discovers a dark and dangerous secret about artificial intelligence. If that seems a little out of sync with his usual space-hacking fare such as The Martian and Project Hail Mary, that’s because the book doesn’t exist, and neither do most of the other books on the list.

The list was published in a 64-page supplement that ran in major US newspapers like the Chicago Sun-Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer. The feature listed fifteen must-read books, only five of which exist, and it’s no surprise that AI is to behind the muck-up. Writer Marco Buscaglia took the blame, saying that he used an LLM to produce the list without checking the results. Nobody else in the editorial chain appears to have reviewed the list either, resulting in the hallucination getting published. Readers are understandably upset about this, but for our part, we’re just bummed that Andy doesn’t have a new book coming out.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: May 25, 2025” →

2025 Pet Hacks Contest: Feline Facial Recognition Foils Food Filching

May 25, 2025 by 6 Comments

Cats are no respecters of personal property, as [Joe Mattioni] learned when one of his cats, [Layla] needed a special prescription diet. Kitty didn’t care for it, and since the other cat, [Foxy]’s bowl was right there– well, you see where this is going. To keep [Layla] out of [Foxy]’s food and on the vet-approved diet, [Joe] built an automatic feeding system with feline facial recognition. As you do.

The hardware consists of a heavily modified feed bowl with a motorized lid that was originally operated by motion-detection, an old Android phone running a customized TensorFlow Lite model, and hardware to bridge them together. Bowl hardware has yet to be documented on [Joe]’s project page, aside from the hint that an Arduino (what else?) was involved, but the write up on feline facial recognition is fascinating.

See, when [Joe] started the project, there were no cat-identifying models available– but there were lots of human facial recognition models. Since humans and cats both have faces, [Joe] decided to use the MobileFaceNet model as a starting point, and just add extra training data in the form of 5000 furry feline faces. That ran into the hurdle that you can’t train a TFLite model, which MobileFaceNet is, so [Joe] reconstructed it as a Keras model using Google CoLab. Only then could the training occur, after which the modified model was translated back to TFLite for deployment on the Android phone as part of a bowl-controller app he wrote.

No one, [Joe] included, would say that this is the easiest, fastest, or possibly even most reliable solution– a cat smart enough not to show their face might sneak in after the authorized feline has their fill, taking advantage of a safety that won’t close a bowl on a kitty’s head, for example–but that’s what undeniably makes this a hack. It sounds like [Joe] had a great learning adventure putting this together, and the fact that it kept kitty on the proper diet is really just bonus.

Want to go on a learning adventure of your own? Click this finely-crafted link for all the details about this ongoing contest.

2025 Hackaday Pet Hacks Contest

 

Aquassist fish feeder

2025 Pet Hacks Contest: Aquassist Fish Feeder

May 23, 2025 by No comments

This project submitted to the 2025 Pet Hacks Contest brings a bit of IoT to your finned friends. Aquassist is a fish feeder that is primarily 3D printed only requiring a servo and a microcontroller to give you remote control of feeding your fish.

The Aquassist consists of just six 3D-printed parts. At its core is an Archimedes screw, a mechanism that ensures consistent portions of fish food are dispensed into the fish tank. A small hopper on top holds the food, and to minimize the part count, all 3D-printed components are designed to be glued together.

The brains of the operation take place in a Wemos D1 mini, a compact ESP8266 board programed using the Arduino IDE. The feeding mechanism relies on an SG90 continuous rotation servo, which rotates the Archimedes screw to dispense food. Unlike standard servos, this model offers ample torque in a small package and can rotate continuously without hitting an angular limit.

The Aquassist is controlled via a web-based application accessible from any device. The D1 Mini connects to Firebase to check the feeding schedule or detect if the “Feed Now” button has been pressed. Users can set feeding times or trigger an immediate feeding through the app’s intuitive interface. Check out a video below to see the Aquassist in action, and check our our other entries into the 2025 Pet Hacks Contest.

Continue reading “2025 Pet Hacks Contest: Aquassist Fish Feeder” →

2025 Pet Hacks Contest: Keep Your Hound Toasty Warm With This Heated Dog Bed

May 23, 2025 by 2 Comments

It’s been a universal trait among the different faithful Hackaday Hounds who have loped around these parts over the decades, that there is no place warm enough for their tastes. Fire up the stove and the dog is there stretched out in front of it, leaving one to wonder whether our house temperature is being cruel to the mutt, or simply that they are heat sponges with infinite capacity. There’s got to be some joy in doggy circles then at the prospect of [John.r.sheahan]’s heated dog bed, designed in particular with the comfort of an older dog in mind.

In electronics terms it’s a relatively low-tech project, using as it does a 12 volt electric lap blanket aimed at motorists. It’s none the less a hack though, because it has a frame made of PVC pipe to hold it, and a blanked clipped in place. This forms a box-like structure above the sleeping position keeping the dog very comfortable indeed over chilly nights. We’ve cared for more than one geriatric dog over the years, and can see that something like this is vital for their comfort and well-being.

This project is part of the 2025 Pet Hacks contest, so look out for more like it. Alternatively if your faithful friend uses something you made, why not enter yourself!

2025 Hackaday Pet Hacks Contest

2025 Pet Hacks Contest: Loko Tracks Fido With LoRa And GPS

May 22, 2025 by 7 Comments

Some projects start as hacks, and end as products — that’s the case for [Akio Sato]’s project Loko, the LoRa/GPS tracker that was entered in our 2025 Pet Hacks Contest. The project dates all the way back to 2019 on Hackaday.io, and through its logs you can see its evolution up to the announcement that Loko is available from SeeedStudio.

It’s not a device necessarily limited to pets. In fact, the original use case appears to have been a backup locator beacon for lost drones. But it’s still a good fit for the contest none-the-less: at 12 grams, the tiny tracking device won’t bother even the most diminutive of pups, and will fit on any collar at only 30 mm x 23 mm. The “ground station” that pairs with your phone is a bit bigger, of course, but unless you have a Newfoundlander or a St. Bernard you’re likely bigger than fido. The devices use LoRa to provide a range up to 15 km — maybe better if you can loop them into a LoRaWAN. Depending on how often you pin the tracker, it can apparently last for as long as 270 days, which we really hope you won’t need to track a missing pet.

The hardware is based around Seeed’s Wio-E5 LoRa chip, which packages an STM32 with a LoRA radio. The firmware is written in MicroPython, and everything is available via GitHub under the MIT license. Though the code for the mobile app that interfaces with that hardware doesn’t appear to be in the repository at the moment. (There are folders, but they’re disappointingly empty.) The apps are available free on the iOS App Store and Google Play, however.

There’s still plenty of time to submit your own hacks to the Pet Hacks Contest, so please do! You have until May 10th, so if you haven’t started yet, it’s not too late to get hacking.

2025 Hackaday Pet Hacks Contest

Hackaday Supercon 2025 Call For Participation: We Want You!

May 22, 2025 by 11 Comments

We’re tremendously excited to be able to announce that the Hackaday Supercon is on for 2025, and will be taking place October 31st through November 2nd in Pasadena, California.

Supercon is about bringing the Hackaday community together to share our great ideas, big and small. So get to brainstorming, because we’d like to hear what you’ve been up to! Like last year, we’ll be featuring both longer and shorter talks, and hope to get a great mix of both first-time presenters and Hackaday luminaries. If you know someone you think should give a talk, point them here.

The Call for Participation form is online now, and you’ve got until July 3rd 10th to get yourself signed up.

Honestly, just the people that Supercon brings together is reason enough to attend, but then you throw in the talks, the badge-hacking, the food, and the miscellaneous shenanigans … it’s an event you really don’t want to miss. And as always, presenters get in for free, get their moment in the sun, and get warm vibes from the Hackaday audience. Get yourself signed up now!

We’ll have more news forthcoming in the next few weeks, including the start of ticket sales, so be sure to keep your eyes on Hackaday.