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3D printable cat feeder (2020)
- bactisme 5y agoWhat a gentle cat ... I know cats that would have immediately dismantled the things for research purposes.
- UncleOxidant 5y agoCats are scientists.
- numlock86 5y agoI always had the impression that feeding your car (or any pet in general) was important social interaction for the animal. Automated feeding is at least cool for when you are not around much or for a few days only I guess.
- inglor_cz 5y agoMaybe the cat is 3D printed too... Just joking, but actually, 3D printing works with living cells, though not yet up to the level of printing an entire animal :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_bioprinting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_bioprinting
- the_third_wave 5y agoFeeding the cat is an important social interaction as well as a sure-fire way to get the critter to show up when you want it to (assuming the cat is even allowed to go outside of course, this is not a given). In that respect a cat feeder is a net negative... That said, this is a well-executed project which integrates a number of skills - theoretical, mechanical, logical - to produce something useful.
- lexicality 5y agoFrom what I understand for dogs it's very important for you to feed them, but for cats it's more important that food is made available to it regularly and consistently than from you specifically. If a cat is hungry and knows you provide food, it will keep trying to figure out ways to make you give it the food which can lead to very strange and negative behaviours. However if a cat learns that food will show up in a mysterious box at precise times, it will just wait until that time which will make it happier as it understands what it has to do to eat (wait) and you happier because it won't be scratching at you and yowling
- BugsJustFindMe 5y agoMy experience is that cats often start yowling at the machine about 20 minutes before they run. It's probably more of a case by case thing.
- kevincox 5y agoYup. I had a very "food motivated" cat and our lives was made much more pleasant by setting a "food alarm". That way she wouldn't bother me until the alarm goes off. My current cats are free-fed but they get quite annoying if their bowl runs low. (they know how to get your attention)
- JoeAltmaier 5y agoI don't think my outdoor cat give a flying flip whether I'm around when it's eating the mouse it caught.
- at_a_remove 5y agoHand-feeding is important for kittens and feral cats, but once they are grown and domesticated it is less so. They do like you to be involved, but there's quite a bit of annoying behavior once the cat learns that you feed them the first thing in the morning. I guess if I wake you up early ...
- wlesieutre 5y agoI've pushed my cats' breakfast time back a few hours after I wake up so they can't directly associate "human is awake now" with "it's time for food!" They've since stopped waking me up before my alarm goes off, and I can even sleep in a bit on weekends. This was easier to do when my office was full remote for COVID, being in New England we're starting to reopen now.
- UncleOxidant 5y agoI've got an automated feeder that drops food at 3AM because I got tired of getting up at 3AM to feed them - they would get pretty insistent. I hand feed them the rest of the day unless I'm going to be out and then I turn on the other feed times on the feeder.
- kevinbowman 5y agoI really like that this weighs the cat; having regular, non-intrusive cat health metrics is particularly useful. Weight change can be a sign of a variety of other issues, but also probably a bunch of non-issues, so _only_ weighing a cat on an annual visit to the vet is less useful but it's quite a pain to manually weigh the cat each day to see trends. Even if only to calibrate the amount of food to dose over time, it's a useful feature. Nice project!
- codazoda 5y agoI own a Wyze scale and I noticed my cat standing on it. So, I created an account for her. She steps on it often enough that the wyze app gives me weight charts for her. I bet it would give me readings multiple times a day if I just set it in front of her food dish.
- whateveracct 5y agoI just have a baby scale I plop my guys on occasionally. And then I record their weight in an iOS note. Weighing your cat and paying attention to their digestion (recording vomiting frequency, inspecting stools) really goes a long way towards keeping a cat healthy.
- nallic 5y agoWill there be an automated cat litterbox integration soon ? ;) Really awesome build!
- bradknowles 5y agoThere are existing automated cat litter box solutions. I don’t see any need to reinvent that wheel, but if you’ve got some specific ideas, I’d be happy to listen.
- zihotki 5y agoActually you can teach your cat to use standard toilet and add there some sort of automatic flush.
- kuu 5y agoThis is awesome! With all that data you could do some ML model to make sure your cat is on proper weight (or study the patterns just for fun even, if you later don't apply it), like delivering more or less food or at appropriate intervals.
- OJFord 5y ago> Please note: the views I express are mine alone and they do not necessarily reflect the views of Amazon.com. Why would they? Because of a little diagram of using AWS IoT, Lambda, and S3? Weird disclaimer. Cool project though - I particularly like graphing the cat's weight too, seems like it doesn't really overeat just because it's available. I've never had cats, but I think dogs would basically just wolf it all down every time you filled it up. Though that could be an interesting experiment, assuming that was the starting point, teaching them that the food is plentiful, and they can just use the feeder when hungry.
- papercrane 5y ago> Why would they? Because of a little diagram of using AWS IoT, Lambda, and S3? Weird disclaimer. I'm guessing he added that because he's Amazon employee.
- laumars 5y agoBecause he works for Amazon. That might even be a standard footer across all of his blogs.
- mrbbb 5y agoI was about to do this with a watering station. After reading it took them 1.5 years tho, I’ll probably reconsider.
- bradknowles 5y agoThere are plenty of cat water fountains out there. I would be very suspicious of any claim for the handling of cat watering solutions that cannot be handled with one of the existing products on the market. But I would be happy to discuss that matter further, if you really think you’ve got a game changer.
- spookthesunset 5y agoOne thing I've learned over the years is it usually isn't worth trying to custom build something you can get on Amazon for $50. The adult in me knows this but damn is the kid in me dissapointed.
- Noxmiles 5y agoI like a good overengineering! :3 Very nice to watch / read. Also: see his blog for posts about the PCB design and STLs etc: https://piotr.westfalewicz.com/blog/ https://piotr.westfalewicz.com/blog/
- exabrial 5y agoSide note, what the blog software he's using? Looks really nice
- ta988 5y agoThis is a bad idea. 3d printed objects unless filled with food-grade resins are not food safe as they cannot be cleaned (ridges of the layers) and tend to release a lot of not well characterized compounds.
- Youden 5y ago> This is a bad idea. Why did you have to add this? The rest of your post raises a valid point and then suggests a way to address it. Is one small addressable flaw enough to render the rest of the project "a bad idea"?
- TeMPOraL 5y agoI wouldn't call creating a health hazard for your cat a "small" flaw.
- JoeAltmaier 5y ago...unless you fix it, as described. Then it's not a flaw at all. The rules here say to read each post with the most positive interpretation. Snark is never welcome, and that could have been said differently e.g. "A great idea! Be sure to use food-grade resin!"
- elif 5y agoPlease stay on topic you are not a moderator
- JoeAltmaier 5y agoOh sorry, are you? I did not know.
- TeMPOraL 5y agoFair enough. Your alternative phrasing sounds much better! Thanks for the reminder. I suppose I'm somewhat desensitized to snark these days; that's not a development I like.
- willis936 5y agoHere is my (much lower tech) 3DP solution to feeding my cat. He is insane and will eat as much as he can. If he was free fed he would die. If he eats from a bowl his food is gone in 30 seconds and he gets agitated. https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4335532 https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4335532
- panzerklein 5y agoThis looks nice. My cat is the same and I use plastic bottle with a couple of holes.
- elif 5y agoWhat a shame. There are a dozen automatic dry kibble feeders you can buy for $50. The dashboard/stats are kinda all trivia. This is okay for short trips or fortunately young/healthy cats. But what will really push the cat robot meta forward is a feeder capable of refrigerated wet food dispensing.
- dangerbird2 5y agoYes! Wet cat food is so unpleasant to deal with, despite being arguably much healthier than kibble. IIRC, since cats prefer to get their fluids from food rather than drinking water from a bowl, wet food goes a long way in preventing dehydration and associated kidney issues. I guess the reason we've never seen a wet food dispenser is that the only thing worse than cleaning gross wet food residue from a bowl is cleaning it from an overengineered electric dispenser.
- at_a_remove 5y agoI think a wet food dispenser would be fantastic, but you are right in that there are quite a lot of hurdles to it -- spoilage, the often unpleasant smell of wet cat food, the tendency for it to gum up the works as opposed to the more tractable to automation kibble, which merrily rolls along. My gut feeling here says that any solution in this area is going to involve some kind of can engineering, maybe as far back in the chain as having specially designed wet food dispenser cans. Refrigeration, too, would come into play unless you were working on a one-redesigned-can, one-serving paradigm. Perhaps a Peltier cooler with the waste heat going to warm some kind of cat friendly pad, as well as the food once served (given that they are carnivores, I am betting that cats would prefer wet food the approximate temperature of mouse guts). And do not get me started on the struggles of multiple cats, where one or more cats is on a special diet. I think wet food dispensing could honestly be very healthy for cats (or dogs) but we just haven't spent much time engineering for it.
- bradknowles 5y agoThey already have cat food pouches. Do you want a Juicero for wet cat food pouches? TBH, I really don’t think Juicero solved any of the actual hard problems you would have for the automation of the serving of wet cat food.
- bborud 5y agoYeah, I'm going to need something a lot more robust than that to keep my cats out of the feeder. They rip the lids off of the metal cans I use to store cat foot. :-)
- mopierotti 5y agoIn a similar vein, having fostered 30+ cats, I've found that using a "food tree puzzle" is especially useful. It's a good way to let them have snack and entertain themselves when they feel like it, without letting them potentially binge eat. (This is in addition to wet food as primary meals)
- daemonk 5y agoThis is awesome. And the data can be really valuable. I think feeding and litter box habits are some of the best indicators for a cat's health.