Infrared robotic food dish system to stop my cat from snacking
So I have one skinny cat who eats super slow and one chubby cat who eats everything in sight. My solution was to make a bowl for the skinny cat (Scrappy) to slowly snack from that blocks the other cat (Howl). I made little rechargeable infrared tag for Howl that signals the dish like a tv remote. I took the battery from an old earbud charging case and designed the circuit around an Atmel Attiny13 - I have a number of those and their small program memory makes them rarely useful so I was happy to find an application. The dish uses a hobby servo to rotate a piece of plexiglass over the food. I modified the servo to provide analog position feedback to avoid paw-pinching (it backs off briefly when the set pwm position deviates from the measured position). The dish is built around an Atmega328 programmed with an Ardiuno. I included a potentiometer knob to set how long it stays closed after detection, and a multicolor led to indicate it's current state. Howl defeated the first prototype within a day by yanking the Attiny from his tag - check out the short video to see it all unfold! I have the youtube channel Kittendo where I document projects like this (I also make animated shorts). It's mostly been shorts lately because I made one that took off and now I'm leaning into it, but I should get back to long form videos soon. #home source