hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr3385.txt

Episode: 3385
Title: HPR3385: DIY Cat feeder!
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3385/hpr3385.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 22:28:53

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3385 for Friday, the 23rd of July 2021.
Today's show is entitled, Did I Cat Feeder?
It is hosted by Operator and is about 14 minutes long and carries a clean flag.
The summary is, I talk about 3D printed cat feeders.
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Hello everyone and welcome to my episode of Hacker Public Radio with your host operator.
Today I'm going to be talking about cat feeders.
If you're not interested in DIY, Arduino and 3D printing and cats then it's probably not
the best for you.
It's all started when Hacker Cat tended to meow a lot and have lots of vocal things to
be fed and it would be right at or near 7 o'clock when we feed the cat, sometimes 30 minutes
before, sometimes an hour before and he would start meowing and driving my wife nuts.
I thought it was hilarious and I would just keep messing with the cat and we would all
meow together as a giant family and torment my wife but I thought it would be the best
to think about some options and I said, you know what, what we could do is set up an automatic
feeder.
So I want to go through that whole scenario and kind of give you the story a year or two
or three later.
So I started out to think, okay well, I've got access to a 3D printer, I could 3D print
my own, I could obviously buy one but I thought it would be a nice project because I hadn't
done any of the Arduino stuff.
I had done some pie stuff before and I may have done some Arduino stuff before but I can't
remember.
But I think that was my first time doing Arduino stuff and then the pie stuff I've worked
on several pies that weren't mine or whatever and I'm kind of generally familiar with how
they all work so it's not super interesting to me but I wanted to get a go at the Arduino stuff.
So this one is on Thingiverse which is a 3D printable and other things that you can 3D print
and or make, it's not specific to 3D printing, there's other stuff up there.
It's a DIY and the one I landed on and I'll put it in the show notes, the ID of the thing is 27854.
Again, that's 27854 and it is a auger based cat feeder by CatLin, KitLin.
So essentially what it is is some two halves of an auger and then a mounting system for,
I think it's 1.5 or a 1 inch PVC, 1.5 inch PVC joint, 12 volt adapter, 0.3 amps is not enough.
So there's some notes in there about his stuff I built it. I didn't have any problems.
I had to do a lot of a fair amount of sanding on the auger to make it smooth so the auger
is obviously 3D printed so the steps on the auger are kind of rigid so I tried to do my best
to sand the edges where it was going to sit the PVC. So I had to do a fair bit of sanding to get
it all happy and then after gluing it together I did a lot of sanding. I'm not an overabundant
not a amount that would be frustrating enough to where the project wouldn't be worth it but I
did do more sanding than I thought I would need to. Again, this is my first project so it basically
comes, you get a little CV, not a CV but what do they call them? Servos. You get a servo
pop it in there. Servos can be kind of programmed to rotate either 360 degrees or clockwise or
kind of clockwise or you can tell it to rotate one direction this way maximum or one direction.
That way maximum so you can kind of set how you want them. It's the kind of thing you see on
like RC cars those are those are servos. So anyways the servo and the ingenious part of it is that
a lot of these feeding mechanisms jam and things like that. This one in particular has it goes
forward a little bit and then goes back and then goes forward a little bit and then goes back
to reduce jamming. That way if a piece of food gets stuck in there it will kind of unjam
itself because of the programming that's in there. So I thought that was interesting and
one that allowed for error corrections and things like that. Some of the other there's a
million cat feeders up there. Some of the other ones just didn't look like they would be
simple enough and or less not prone to issues. So I ended up setting it all up. I used a
gallon jug with cut out just kind of taped the bottom of it and that's a proof of concept.
It's been about I want to say maybe four hours building it after three printing the thing. So all
in all it's probably five hours worth of work. Coding, printing, sanding, proof of concepting
to proof of concept. I would say it's about five hours. So not a lot of work but more than you
would think for a little job like this. But it was the first time 3D printing use other than
fun. Anyways, so I'll get into the technical part. It worked and it was on a timer but you know
I had the friend that's kind of a electronics guy said you don't want to leave this on. You don't
want to really leave it plugged in. It's kind of a proof of concept, danger, danger. And
wife had overheard that and she had purchased a, was like during Christmas time. She had purchased
an auto feeder from from China or whatever that was on sale somewhere and we ended up using that
one. You can record stuff. And to this day, three, four years later, it actually still works
surprisingly. So what I'll say about the auto feeders in general is that there is some kind of
bonding element that goes along. I didn't do a whole lot of reading into it but our cats seem to
still exhibit things around the cat feeding time. He would just kind of be odd and
off putting and come to find out. I think it's kind of a bonding slash ritual thing. So if
if the food comes out of the cat feeder, they don't room necessarily put two and two together
either right away or at all because it's kind of like a routine or a bonding thing. So if the
machine feeds the cat, you kind of lose, which kind of makes sense. You kind of lose some of that
bonding or whatever you want to call it, expectation or ritual or whatever. And there's some,
I think from what I was reading, it feels like there's some kind of, you know, if you have a robot
feeding your cat, it's not as mentally healthy as physically feeding your cat and you know,
petting it in all that crap. Our cat gets plenty of attention, mind you, by my wife, unfortunately.
So that's one thing to keep in mind. Another thing is the side of your food, the size of your food.
Are they small pellets? Are they big pellets? We used it for a while. The cat wouldn't eat.
He would kind of eat and then he wouldn't eat and then he would kind of eat and the bowl would
start getting fuller and fuller. They have these, the one I've seen is purple. It's a device in
which you drop the food in and it's got these little pillars, almost these around soft pillars.
The food goes down in there and they have to kind of fish it out. So if you have a cat that
since they eat too much, you can use one of these, they call them like, I don't know what they're
called, but they're cat anti eating food, cat things, fest things. So this one in particular is
like purple, it's oval and it's got a raised surface to it and the food goes in there and it falls
down the raised surface and then distributes the cat food kind of all across the bowl or device
or whatever so that they can get to the cat food but they don't have to eat it like crazy.
We even tried that and he seemed to still have issues kind of initiating, eating and eating
enough in all this food. We were feeding him a normal amount and he wasn't eating that
like at all for a while. So my wife started getting nervous and mixing in of course wet,
fancy cat food and now here it is three years later. They were back to the same problem if not
even worse because the cat demands the the wet cat food or whatever. So anyways, we have fancy
cat food. It's anti this or whatever supposed to be fancy cat food. It's like almost prescription
or whatever to help with urine UTIs. If your cat has issues, they rarely exhibit signs because cats
don't, whatever the term is, cats don't show pain very well. So if your cat's acting odd really
be careful about especially UTIs because you can kind of rub their belly and tell if there's
any pressure there. So keep an eye on your cat. You know, feel what your cat's belly feels like
with a normal tension of the belly and around that area. And then that way if you do have a UTI
on your hands, your cat's not going to be dead by the time you figure out what's going on because
things can go bad. Quickly ours was on its back behind the toilet waiting to die because I came in
and he was just like, I don't know if it's like something's wrong, we have to get the pet.
And they said that he was pretty much like about to die because he was about to explode.
So anyways, he had a UTI and we had to keep him elevated. I don't know how you keep a cat elevated.
But anyways, that's pretty much it. I think I might have mentioned or had a podcast about my old
cat feeder. This was a dual cat feeder. I'm pretty sure I did an episode about it if not.
I'm just going to go over it real quickly. It's two cat feeder doors. So there's RFID cat doors
you can get for about a hundred dollars a piece. I ended up giving them both away
and losing my butthole on that. And we had two cats and two fancy, one of them had fancy cat food
because of the UTI. Way since then got rid of the other cat. But we had two at one point in time.
So I got two of these RFID cat feeders. I put the leashes, the RFID things on their on their neck.
And it took them quite some time to get used to it. The way I designed it was a,
if you see the styrofoam coolers, cheap styrofoam coolers, in hindsight, you should use a hot
knife and leave yourself about half an inch of melting this room. Because if you draw a line
to cut, it's going to melt away more than you expect. So you want to leave yourself about a
half an inch on the measurements. But the idea is the hot knife will melt through the styrofoam
and do a better cutting job as opposed to cutting styrofoam, which makes a flip and mess.
So if you want to kind of be environmentally friendly, sort of kind of, I mean the fumes are
awful for you, but you can use the hot like old hot butter knife. So if you can use the old hot
bread knife, I have an old bread knife that I use for all kinds of crazy stuff. And I'll heat
the idea as you heat that bread knife up. And then you use that to cut the precise measurements
of the styrofoam with the meltiness of the bread knife. So anyways, I've got these two cat feeders.
And then I kind of set up a partition in the middle. And then I put the bowl on one side and a
bowl on the other. So the hole enclosure was three feet long maybe. And then it was partitioned
on the middle. And each side had a cat door on it. It did take a while to train them. One of the
cats actually flipped the styrofoam up, which is relatively light. He flipped it up and just ate
both cat food. But after a while, they after some thing, because cats don't like things
touching their ears or head, they want to see what's going on around them and for them to stick
their head inside of a hole and have a door touching their head and have to eat without being
able to see what's around them. And hindsight, that's not probably the best idea. You probably
want to have it big enough or where they can get in there and be safe and physically be inside
of the device. That might help. But anyways, cats don't want to, well, don't want to have to use
their heads to open a door. That took quite some time for them to figure out because they put
their paw in front of the door to try to push the door open and their neck wouldn't be close enough
to activate the RFID. So they would sit there and struggle to try to get the rope. And then
finally, that's about a day or two. They all figured out that if there's food, they'll find a way
to get it if you haven't had a cat go at your food bowl or a food bag while you're at a town or
whatever. They'll find a way to feed themselves generally. That's pretty much it. You know, be nice
to your cats, be nice to your pets. You know, get a pet comb and brush your cat, especially if it's
got lots of hair. Anyways, hope that helps somebody out and y'all have a good one.
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