Collaborate Disseminate
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 …read more Continue reading Hacking Developers With a Cat Feeder: Who’s a Good Kitty?
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 …read more
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 …read more
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 …read more
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 …read more
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 …read more
Continue reading Cat Feeder Has Steampunk Flair and a GMail Account
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 …read more
Continue reading Opto-Isolating Automatic Cat Feeder Problems