Hacking Developers With A Cat Feeder: Who’s A Good Kitty?

Most of us probably know the drudgery of getting through some coding work, with just tedious hours of monkeying around stretching ahead of us. What if this tedium were to be interrupted by an occasional reward when we did something productive, like pushing a commit or other measure of progress? That’s roughly the concept that [John Partee] started off with when his gaze fell upon one of those automated cat feeders. Cat or developer, who doesn’t like to hear the tinkle of a tasty treat falling into their bowl?

The target pet feeder is a PetKit Fresh Element Solo, which allows for objects with a size of 12×12 mm (any orientation) to be fed through the feeding mechanism. Fortunately [John]’s favorite dark chocolate-covered almonds treat fit these requirements, and he set to work to figure out the REST API call needed to trigger a manual feeding event on the cat feeder device, employing the existing PyPetKit Python library that does the heavy lifting of connecting to and communicating with PetKit’s servers, as the feeder is of course an IoT device.

This means that the event flow still depends on PetKit’s “cloud”, which may inspire some enterprising hackers to make a stand-alone version, the development of which may be assisted by [John]’s solution through a regular treat. Before taking such a solution into use, be sure to discuss it with any pets you have, as they may not quite comprehend why there’s no reward for them whenever the *tinkle* sound occurs.

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A Simple Auger Pet Feeder

Pet feeders are a popular maker project. One can speculate that this shows the great self-confidence common to the maker set, who are willing to trust their own work to keep their animal companions alive for many days at a a time. [Darren Tarbard] is one such maker, who put together this simple auger build.

The project consists of a hopper for dry pet food, into which a screw auger is inserted. Both parts are 3D printed, making them easy to produce at home for the average maker. The build was designed specifically around the parts [Darren] had to hand, namely a 28BYJ-48 stepper motor, which is charged with turning the auger. Running the show is an Arduino, which can be run with whatever suitable timing code is necessary to feed the particular pet in question. There’s also a remixed version that adds a larger food storage dish on top for longer periods of unattended operation, created by [szuchid].

It’s a basic build, but one that would be readily achievable by most makers with little more than some junkbox components and a roll of filament. Of course, if your pet prefers wet food, you might need a different design. Video after the break.

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Cat Diner Now Under New Management

Most of these stories start with a cat standing on someone’s chest, begging for food at some obscene hour of the morning. But not this one. Chaz the cat is diabetic, and he needs to get his insulin with breakfast. The problem is that Chaz likes to eat overnight, which ruins his breakfast appetite and his chances at properly metabolizing the insulin. [Becky] tried putting the bowl away before bed, but let’s face it — it’s more fun to solve a problem once than to solve the same problem every night.

[Becky]’s solution was to design and print a bowl holder with a lid, and to cover the bowl when the cat diner is closed using a small servo and a NodeMCU. It looks good, and it gets the job done with few components. Chaz gets his insulin, [Becky] gets peace of mind, and everybody’s happy. This isn’t going to work for all cats, because security is pretty lax. But Chaz is a senior kitty and therefore disinterested in pawing at the lid to see what happens. Claw your way past the break to see [Becky]’s build/demo video featuring plenty of cat tax coverage.

We’ve seen a lot of cat feeding apparatus around here, but few that solve a specific problem like this one. If it’s overengineering and cat metrics you want, come and get it.

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Fortified Feeder For Feral Felines

Most of the commercially-available pet feeders littering the internet are cheaply-made, with wimpy motors and infuriating interfaces. Want to use it outdoors? Good luck. If you need a heavy-duty, outdoor cat feeder, you gotta heat up your soldering iron and do it yourself.

[jplanaux] is under contract to feed a bunch of feral cats that hang around, but he’s often gone for weeks at a time. His two-feeder fail-over system has one weak link, and it’s these commercial feeders — they’re under-powered and just plain unreliable, even after modding them for Raspi control. What he needed was an industrial strength automatic feeder that’s completely customized for his situation.

A simple web interface lets him set up automatic feeding times, or push kibble on demand if customers show up and there’s no food. The system takes pictures of the bowl to verify that food came out and was subsequently eaten. It’s supposed to be racoon-proof, so [jplanaux] can see who or what is chowing down. Aside from that, the feeder is pretty standard, with a large hopper on top of a screw drive that’s driven by a NEMA17. The stepper is relay-driven, so it only uses power when it’s driving the screw.

[jplanaux] has the STL files and code available, and even designed a bowl and base extension for people who want to build one and use it indoors. Nibble at the kibble-sized demo video after the break.

The lion’s share of the auto-feeder builds we chew on around here are designed for dry food. Serving wet food is a much harder problem, but is definitely possible to pull off.

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Hackaday Podcast 012: Nearly Perpetual Motion, Mars Rover Carries Kid, And Doc Brown’s Cat Feeder

Editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys catch up on the past week in hackerdom. It seems as if we’re in a golden age of machine building as an incredible rocker-bogie rover is built to transport a child and mechanical simplicity automates the wet cat food dispensing process. We marvel at the ability to use G-code to decorate eggs (them being curvy in more than one direction and all). The we contemplate the ability to build and start a motor which will continue to run long after your own life ends. And perhaps it’s time to add more layers to your PCB design playbook.

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Direct download (60 MB or so.)

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Cat Feeder Has Steampunk Flair And A GMail Account

While it is often said that “necessity is the mother of invention”, we can’t say that’s always been our experience here at Hackaday. You won’t need to search too long before you find a project or hack on this site that definitely falls out of the realm of strict necessity. But that’s part of the fun, there’s a reason this site isn’t called AppropriateUseOfTime.com

But when [Sam Storino] couldn’t seem to stop his cats from howling for their supper at 3:00 AM, he had the perfect opportunity to fulfill that age-old wisdom. Not only did he manage to turn a trip to the plumbing isle of his local home improvement store into a very Steampunk-looking automatic cat feeder, but he also found the time to write up an exceptionally detailed series of blog posts on what he learned during the process.

The heart of the machine is everyone’s favorite Linux board, the Raspberry Pi. You might be thinking the Pi is overkill for a simple timer, and you’d be right. Rather than just dump the food out on a set schedule, [Sam] decided to get a little fancy and come up with some Python scripts that will monitor a GMail inbox and activate the feeder hardware when it receives an email with the title “feed cats”. He then uses IFTTT to send the appropriately named email to the GMail account of his cat feeder on a specific schedule. Hey, nobody said necessity was the mother of straightforward invention.

In the final post of the series, [Sam] goes over the hardware side of the device. Copper pipe makes up the frame, which holds a commercial off-the-shelf dry food dispenser. The feeder was designed for manual operation, but by attaching a continuous rotation servo [Sam] can spin it up and dump a pre-measured amount of food via the Pi’s GPIO pins. The addition of some PVC pipe and fittings takes the food and (at least in theory) divides it equally between the two cat bowls below.

If you think [Sam] may have put a bit more thought than was necessary into something as simple as feeding his pets, keep in mind that he’s in exceptionally good company. Paging through the archives, it seems the intersection of felines and hackers is littered with gloriously complex contraptions.

Opto-Isolating Automatic Cat Feeder Problems

When you buy an off-the-shelf automatic cat feeder, you might well expect it to do the one thing it’s supposed to do. Feed the cat. Well, at least as long as you do your part by keeping it filled with food nuggets. [Stephen] had the sneaking suspicion that his feeder was slacking occasionally, and set out to prove this theory.

He had a few ideas for approaching the investigation. One was to set up a web cam, but that proved unreliable. Another idea was to log the weight changes of the food bowl. This seemed like a possibility because the reading would change dramatically whenever it was filled. The method he settled on is a good one, too — monitor the motor’s activity and look for holes. After all, the motor only runs when it’s feeding time.

The design is based around a smart door/window alarm, which is little more than a reed switch with networking capabilities. [Stephen] wired up an opto-isolator so that when the motor runs, the reed switch is triggered but not fried, and the event gets logged in Google Sheets. Any missed meals are weeded out with a script that alerts [Stephen] via email and text that his poor kitty is hungry.

If [Stephen] ever wants to build his own cat feeder, we have plenty of designs for inspiration.