dogs

6 Articles

A cat sits on a dark green mid-century modern bench next to a cat-sized black piano. A black bowl sits beneath the piano to catch food. An abstract green, blue, and tan picture in a black frame is on the wall above the cat and a black bar stool can be seen around the corner. It looks like the sort of photo you'd see on Instagram or in an interior design magazine.

Piano Feeder Gets Pets Playing For Their Supper

February 29, 2024 by 21 Comments

If you ever watched a video of Piano Cat and wondered if your cat could learn to play, then [Sebastian Sokołowski] has a possible solution with this combination piano tutor and cat feeder.

Starting with a CNC cut MDF enclosure, [Sokołowski] developed a cat feeder that would fit in the rear of the piano. It had to be reliable, consistent, and easy to disassemble. He walks us through his testing for each of these features and says the feeder was the most difficult part of the project to develop due to the propensity of pet feeder mechanisms to jam.

A custom PCB takes the key presses from the piano (with functional black keys) and outputs the sound from a speaker in the back. Lessons progress through increasing difficulty automatically, encouraging your cat to learn what the different keys can do. Food is dispensed after a performance or on a schedule set through the accompanying smartphone app. All the files are available if you want to build your own, but there is a wait list available if you want a completed version to give to less technically-inclined cat staff.

We’re certainly no stranger to the creatures that rule the internet here at Hackaday, having featured other cat feeders, new research into spaying cats, or even open source robo-cats.

Continue reading “Piano Feeder Gets Pets Playing For Their Supper” →

An orange and white cat eats from a bowl with a hinged cover. The cat and the bowl are on top of an MDF platform.

Load Cells To Get The Right Pet The Right Food

September 18, 2022 by 11 Comments

If you have more than one pet, you may know how hard it is to tell how much each furry friend is eating. If you introduce prescription foods, then this minor annoyance can have a major impact on your pet’s health. Facing this dilemma, [tomasdiazwahl] set out to make a pet feeder that feeds his pets exactly what they need when they approach the feeder.

Using the ever-popular Arduino Uno, the feeder is connected to a platform that uses load cells to detect the pet’s weight. The weight data is then used to identify which animal is looking for food. Once the pet is identified, the correct food bowl opens. It seems this prototype only has one food chamber to keep unauthorized pets from eating the special food, but the basic idea should be extensible to two or more chambers. While some existing solutions read the pet’s microchip or NFC collars to determine who’s at the feeder, [tomasdiazwahl] decided against these given the fickleness of trying to reliably get a reader at the correct position relative to the pet. As long as you don’t have multiple pets with the same weight, it should work just fine.

This project has a nice mix of woodworking, 3D printing, and electronics showing what can be accomplished when you aren’t afraid to mix techniques. We also really appreciate that [Tomasdiazwahl] spent the extra time to include a testing procedure and safety mechanism into the project. Designing a device to improve your pet’s health shouldn’t come with a safety risk!

This isn’t the first cat feeder we’ve covered that uses weight to tell the difference between the pets, and if you want a simpler project to start with, check out this Simple Auger Pet Feeder.

Leigh Johnson’s Guide To Machine Vision On Raspberry Pi

March 1, 2019 by 9 Comments

We salute hackers who make technology useful for people in emerging markets. Leigh Johnson joined that select group when she accepted the challenge to build portable machine vision units that work offline and can be deployed for under $100 each. For hardware, a Raspberry Pi with camera plus screen can fit under that cost ceiling, and the software to give it sight is the focus of her 2018 Hackaday Superconference presentation. (Video also embedded below.)

The talk is a very concise 13 minutes, so Leigh flies through definitions of basic terms, before quickly naming TensorFlow and Keras as the tools she used. The time she saved here was spent on explaining what convolutional neural networks are and how they work, just enough to prepare the audience. But all of that is really just background, the meat of the talk is self-contained examples that Leigh has put together and made available online. I love to see that since it means you go beyond just watching and try it out for yourself. Continue reading “Leigh Johnson’s Guide To Machine Vision On Raspberry Pi” →

Definitive Dog Feeding With Arduino

February 27, 2018 by 3 Comments

Some dogs have no sense of self-preservation. Given the opportunity, they will eat until they’re sick. It’s up to us humans to both feed them and remember doing it so they aren’t accidentally overfed. In a busy household with young children, the tricky part is the remembering.

[Bryan]’s family feeds their dog Chloe once a day, in the mornings. She was a rescue who spent a few years scrounging for meals on the street, so some part of her is always interested in finding food, even if she just ate. Each morning, the flurry of activity throughout the house is compounded by Chloe’s repeated requests for food, so [Bryan] got his kids involved and built a simple circuit that lets everyone know—at a glance—whether Chloe was fed.

Chloe’s kibble is kept in a touch-top wastebasket that flips open at the press of a button. [Bryan]’s dog-fed detector uses a reed switch and an Arduino clone to detect when the lid is opened. When the reed switch goes, low, the Arduino lights up an LED. The light stays on for two hours and then shuts off automatically to get ready for the next day. You don’t have to beg for a demo video, because it’s waiting for you after the break.

Since Chloe devours a bowl of food in about two minutes flat, maybe the next project for [Bryan]’s family could teach her to slow down a bit.

Continue reading “Definitive Dog Feeding With Arduino” →

Hackaday Prize Entry: Twitter Goes To The Dogs With Raspberry Pi Hack

August 21, 2015 by 7 Comments

Dogs are remarkable creatures. Anybody who has lived with one will know that they are very vocal beasts, with barks that range from noting the presence of a squirrel in the yard to the warning whine that says “I am about to pee on your shoes if you don’t take me outside.” [Henry Conklin] decided to computerize the analysis of these noises, putting his dog [Oliver Twitch] on Twitter so he could hear what he was saying while he was at work. [Henry] that is: [Oliver] stays at home.

He did this using a Raspberry Pi, which is set to record sound above a certain volume. With the system sitting by [Oliver’s] favorite window, this records his barks. The recordings are then analyzed using PyAudioAnalysis, a library that analyzes sounds, compares them to reference ones and classifies them.  The Raspberry Pi then posts the results onto twitter using Python-twitter.

The setup used by [Oliver] to capture the barks: a USB microphone, Raspberry Pi and WiFi USB dongle.
The setup used by [Oliver] to capture the barks: a USB microphone, Raspberry Pi and WiFi USB dongle.
Or rather, it will when [Henry] fixes a few bugs: right now it just posts a random string that is based on the length of the bark, not the type. [Henry] says he is working on the dog translation at the moment. It’s still a neat project that shows you how simple it is to use a few small bits of code to gather info from your environment and share these over the Internet. [Henry] also says that the next step is creating a weekly podcast for [Oliver]. I, for one, will be subscribing to hear his thoughts on how annoying the postman is, and how vexing it is to see a squirrel and not be able to chase them.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by: