Earlier quoted context omitted.
How could you tell? Don't they usually act as if they're starving?
It'd be much skinnier and/or dead.
It’s pining for the fjords.
Fixing a broken smart cat feeder with ESP32
21–30 of 53 posts
Re: Fixing a broken smart cat feeder with ESP32
#22What if I have a dumb cat?
I bought a cat food dispenser for $5 at goodwill and plugged it into a $10 "inching" timer plug from AliExpress. 10 seconds every 4 hours. It's the dumbest smart feeder I could make for the dumbest best cat.
Re: Fixing a broken smart cat feeder with ESP32
#23> This thing is covered in sensors; it's got two scales, ostensibly for measuring the weight of the hopper and the weight of food dispensed, a pair of infrared sensors to detect when the hooper is empty, sensors that monitor the motor's turning, and others that I haven't figured out the purpose of. Bad for business if your cat feeder fails to feed the customer's cat and they return from a trip to a very hungry cat.
Yeah, that sentence shows me that this guy isn't an engineer at all, he's just a hacker.
If he made his own automatic litter box (the rotating drum kind) for his cat, he'll also not see the point of all those sensors that "aren't really needed", and one day he'll come home to find his cat chopped in half.
Re: Fixing a broken smart cat feeder with ESP32
#24By the way, .su is the Soviet Union country code top level domain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.su
For weird reasons, the Soviet Union still officially exists in the Internet and it seems to be growing.
Re: Fixing a broken smart cat feeder with ESP32
#25I love Home Assistant but I have yet to venture into the ESP32 board route of things. Can someone point to a good guide to getting started with these boards? How much soldering and/or microcontroller experience is needed?
M5Stack/M5Stick products and Grove accessories comes with batteries onboard and connects with cables
Re: Fixing a broken smart cat feeder with ESP32
#26What if I have a dumb cat?
I bought a cat food dispenser for $5 at goodwill and plugged it into a $10 "inching" timer plug from AliExpress. 10 seconds every 4 hours. It's the dumbest smart feeder I could make for the dumbest best cat.
>$10 "inching" timer plug
Thanks, I didn't know these existed. Another useful "midwit" device to add to the list.
Re: Fixing a broken smart cat feeder with ESP32
#27Smart cat feeder? Cat Smart Feeder?
Re: Fixing a broken smart cat feeder with ESP32
#28It's a nice high-level writeup of getting a flakey piece of consumer electronics back in service, though he used an ESP8266, so I am not sure about the title.
To add more to the confusion, twice in the text of TFA he refers to an ESP8622, which AFAIK isn’t a thing. The ESP8266 is fine in this application of course since he’s using a single GPIO pin.
Re: Fixing a broken smart cat feeder with ESP32
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
A rotation sensor would detect a blocked gear just as fine, maybe even faster than a current monitor - with the advantage of the rotation sensor being unimpeded by slack in the gear train.
Why is the current sensor impeded by slack? It's also much cheaper and more reliable.
By the time the current monitor senses the spike, a lot of tension can build up in the gear train from slack and torsion. A rotation sensor on the outermost axle can detect a blockage way earlier.
Re: Fixing a broken smart cat feeder with ESP32
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is the current sensor impeded by slack? It's also much cheaper and more reliable.
By the time the current monitor senses the spike, a lot of tension can build up in the gear train from slack and torsion. A rotation sensor on the outermost axle can detect a blockage way earlier.
Current sensors can respond in microseconds if needed. Tension takes milliseconds to build up.
I would say the current sensor is probably the right engineering design for reliability, but clearly poor implementation choices were made in this case.
An even better design is a BLDC motor with saliency feedback. That avoids brushes (wear component), and gives both angle and torque feedback. Unfortunately I think someone must have patented it because nobody uses such a design for cheap stuff, despite it being far cheaper.