[HN Gopher] 3D printable cat feeder (2020)
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3D printable cat feeder (2020)
Author : jsiepkes
Score : 84 points
Date : 2021-08-23 07:19 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (piotr.westfalewicz.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (piotr.westfalewicz.com)
| mrbbb wrote:
| I was about to do this with a watering station. After reading it
| took them 1.5 years tho, I'll probably reconsider.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| One 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.
| exabrial wrote:
| Side note, what the blog software he's using? Looks really nice
| Youden wrote:
| If you view the page source: "Hugo 0.55.6 with theme
| Tranquilpeak 0.4.3-SNAPSHOT"
| SevenSigs wrote:
| Hugo 0.55.6 with theme Tranquilpeak 0.4.3-SNAPSHOT
| daemonk wrote:
| This 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.
| kevinbowman wrote:
| I 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!
| whateveracct wrote:
| I 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.
| codazoda wrote:
| I 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.
| ta988 wrote:
| This 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.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| The clear food bin in the video looked like a "normal" bit of
| plastic--almost like a large licorice container. The only other
| part that is in long contact with the food is the actual bowl
| where kitty eats from. Design it so it fits a dishwasher safe
| bowl of some kind and you are good to go. The "guts" where the
| food falls through has minimal contact and for a dog or cat I
| wouldn't loose too much sleep over. For humans I might do
| something more...
|
| That being said... cleaning the "guts" might be a challenge and
| I can see it getting kinda skanky over time. Either reprint the
| parts periodically or find a way to clean them.
| Youden wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| I wouldn't call creating a health hazard for your cat a
| "small" flaw.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| I'm no feline toxicologist but cats only live like 12
| years. I don't think that is long enough for this kind of
| thing to really have any effect.
|
| Plus given it is dry food, I wouldn't loose too much sleep.
| I see animal food and water stored in all kinds of dirty,
| janky contraptions.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| ...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 wrote:
| Please stay on topic you are not a moderator
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Oh sorry, are you? I did not know.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Fair 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.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Me too! I find myself deleting posts as often as I write
| them. In that case I go back and read some of what you
| have written, to remind me how to be calm and
| considerate.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Me? Calm and considerate? Do you even read my comments?!
|
| Seriously though, thanks. While I strive to be what you
| just said, I also delete roughly half of my comments
| before even submitting them (and every now and then, few
| minutes after), and I'm not really happy about the rest.
| I'm pretty grumpy these days, I'm starting to hate the
| technology business more with every passing moment. Is
| this too much HN, or just youthful naivete expiring?
|
| (Few years ago I learned that I won the third place in a
| ranking of HN's top posters of profanities - according to
| some dataset someone is keeping on Kaggle. This dubious
| honour made me tone down my language quite a bit.)
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| I've never won third place in any contest!
| Congratulations! I'm impressed.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Why, thank you!
|
| In the spirit of keeping the positivity train rolling,
| you're the third person (after my wife and daughter) to
| make me smile today, so consider yourself the 3rd place
| winner of this impromptu contest!
| devmor wrote:
| Came here to comment the same thing. Please don't put food on
| 3D printed surfaces, for humans or animals.
| inportb wrote:
| For a print this size, I wouldn't use resin. I imagine he used
| FDM. You might want to consider printing food-related items in
| PLA. The ridges do present a problem, but could be mitigated by
| sanding or coating (again, food-grade).
| willis936 wrote:
| PLA isn't considered food grade but a marginally more
| expensive and difficult to work with, PETG, is food grade.
| Steltek wrote:
| I don't think switching to PETG is an automatic win? You
| still have a rough, porous surface that can trap bacteria.
|
| I stay away from food-related prints but I thought the best
| method was to print in whatever reasonable material you
| want and then coat it in something food grade, like resin.
| Then you get the material and print properties of PLA,
| PETG, whatever but food safe.
| devmor wrote:
| Or use the print to make a mold for casting food grade
| resin.
| GravitasFailure wrote:
| I believe they were suggesting using a food safe epoxy resin
| coating, not using a resin printer to make the part.
| Honestly, since it's dry food the usual food safety risks are
| fairly limited.
| OJFord wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Because he works for Amazon.
|
| That might even be a standard footer across all of his blogs.
| OJFord wrote:
| Oh ok. It doesn't really make sense without disclosing that
| though.
| laumars wrote:
| He does. That's how I know he works at AWS.
| nallic wrote:
| Will there be an automated cat litterbox integration soon ? ;)
|
| Really awesome build!
| zihotki wrote:
| Actually you can teach your cat to use standard toilet and add
| there some sort of automatic flush.
| willis936 wrote:
| Here 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
| panzerklein wrote:
| This looks nice. My cat is the same and I use plastic bottle
| with a couple of holes.
| bborud wrote:
| Yeah, 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. :-)
| bactisme wrote:
| What a gentle cat ... I know cats that would have immediately
| dismantled the things for research purposes.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Cats are scientists.
| elif wrote:
| What 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.
| zarmin wrote:
| What a shame?
| HyprMusic wrote:
| Cat mate's rotating feeder works well for this. You dish out 5
| portions, pop some ice packs underneath it and it will rotate
| at the given time to reveal the food. Not perfect but it lasts
| ok overnight, especially if you put in the next morning's food
| frozen.
|
| I did start building an arduino powered copy of it using a
| peltier plate and some fly prevention mechanisms. The prototype
| worked well but since I'm at home 24/7 these days the project
| fell off my priority list. Maybe this will inspire me to finish
| it.
| dangerbird2 wrote:
| Yes! 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 wrote:
| I 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.
| burnished wrote:
| I think it is a little stronger than preference, my
| understanding is that cats are supposed to get the majority
| of their water intake from their food AND that their tongue
| is not very efficient at drinking water, unlike a dogs which
| is very efficient.
|
| This [1] video does not state my conclusion, but it does (in
| less than two minutes) show slow motion footage of dogs and
| cats drinking. You can see that the dog curls its tongue and
| visibly gets much more liquid up compared to the cat.
|
| [1]
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=295bNJiTA20&ab_channel=Slate
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Maybe they need a giant over engineered press that requires
| internet connectivity to scan and validate each bag of wet cat
| food. We could make it a subscription and each week customers
| would get fresh bags of healthy, organic pre-masticated cat
| food.
|
| It will be like Netflix meets Nesspresso but for cat food!! We
| could call it juicero, er..."catero"!
|
| But seriously. I'd love a good solution for automatic wet cat
| food.
| goblue wrote:
| https://pawbot.com/ has been in various stages of product
| development for years now, the last I heard of which was an
| attempt to reduce scope & cost
| kuu wrote:
| This 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.
| Noxmiles wrote:
| I 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/
| numlock86 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Maybe 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
| lexicality wrote:
| From 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
| kevincox wrote:
| Yup. 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)
| the_third_wave wrote:
| Feeding 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.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| Hand-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 wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| I'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.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| I don't think my outdoor cat give a flying flip whether I'm
| around when it's eating the mouse it caught.
| mopierotti wrote:
| In 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)
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