It uses an old Xbox360 joystick component as her lever, and an arduino and servo dispense the treat. Whenever the lever is pulled in any direction, a treat is dumped into the tray
I used this project as a reason to learn Fusion 360, and I spent a lot of time making tabs (they’ve gotta make it easy to automate this!)
MIDI loves her new toy, and wants to know when she gets to pwn the neightbor cat at Street Fighter =^.^=
I don’t think I show it in those videos, but I added a feature to count the treats as they hit the bowl, and then cut off dispensing once a target number has been reached. It uses a piezo-electric element and some small analog circuit to create a digital signal that the RPi can detect.
The cat has since died, so currently this project is on a shelf in my garage. We are getting a puppy tomorrow, though, so I was thinking of resurrecting the project.
Congratulations. From all of the puppies and dogs we’ve had, I’m thinking tear off the lever and then eat through the side of it to get to the treats. It works just as well.
I gotta take some pics when I get home - it’s a super simple mechanism.
It’s a manual load machine - I put one treat into the loading hole, which falls into a bottle cap attached to a servo horn.
The dispensing is also dumb simple - when the lever is pulled in any direction, the arduino makes the servo turn, which dumps the treat out of the bottle cap onto the ramp and slides down into the tray.
Ah, ok. I was thinking it was a self-feeding mechanism. The reason I asked is that I spent a bunch of time trying to come up with a mechanism to dispense a single cat treat from a hopper containing many of them. I kept running into issues with the cat treats jamming the mechanism. They are pillow shaped, with sharp corners that tend to catch. So I thought maybe you had come up with some clever way around this.
Yeah, I’ve experimented a bit in the past with hoppers and dispensing a single treat, and I didn’t want to tackle that tricky problem for this quick project!
Love your project - looks really well made and robust!