This project might be one of the more useful, practical things I’ve built to date. It arose out of
needing someone to take care of our cats while we were gone on vacation. I have, in the past, rigged
up an automatic cat watering system, but never an automatic feeder.
As you can see it’s simply a box with a motorized wheel that dispenses the food into a chute. Of
course I couldn’t just leave it at that, so I added a few nifty features. Various sensors and switches
are controlled by an Arduino stuck under the food storage area. A super-bright LED and photoresistor
pair, mounted on either side of the food storage area, are used to detect when the food bin is empty.
And an H-Bridge motor controller can be used to reverse the direction of the motor if the Arduino
detects a jam. The Arduino can keep semi-accurate time to dispense food at regular intervals, or a
foot-switch can be pushed to dispense food immediately. (Now, training the cats to step on the foot
switch when they are hungry, is another matter altogether...)
Here you can see that I’m programming the Arduino. Everything is mounted on a breadboard, but will
be soldered to perf-board in finalization. Below you can see my messy room, with an inquisitive cat.
Yay! After quite a bit of fine-tuning and modification, I finally got the cat feeder working. Below
you can see a video of it in action. With the hard part out of the way, it wouldn’t be too hard to
add more features. I’ve though about giving it internet access for remote supervision.
One thing that I should point out is that when I first started this project I was unaware that it is
possible to buy dry cereal dispensers. I’m not completely confident in this feeder’s ability to keep
food fresh, but I imagine a commercially produced cereal dispenser would help quite a bit.