Fixing a broken smart cat feeder with ESP32
1–10 of 53 posts
Re: Fixing a broken smart cat feeder with ESP32
#2It'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.
Re: Fixing a broken smart cat feeder with ESP32
#3I haven't done as much with it, but I've also been very impressed with ESPhome. Seems like a really great piece of software, and super extensible.
The list of supported components is extensive: https://esphome.io/components/index.html
Re: Fixing a broken smart cat feeder with ESP32
#4I 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?
Re: Fixing a broken smart cat feeder with ESP32
#5> 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.
Re: Fixing a broken smart cat feeder with ESP32
#6I 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?
They're pretty great and compatible with most things. ESPHome [1] is a great resource for getting ESP32's working nicely with HA and you can find lots of projects using it to learn from.
You'll likely need to do soldering if you want to connect sensors, batteries and the like.
Personally I really like what SEEED Studio [2] does with their ESP32 boards and they have nice docs.
1. https://esphome.io/ 2. https://www.seeedstudio.com/home-assistant
Re: Fixing a broken smart cat feeder with ESP32
#7> Complex in that they built so much more functionality into the device than was really needed. 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.
I'd love if Surefeed, a competitor, had gone the way of shipping more sensors. Instead, they just monitor the current going through the motor to detect if the lid is closed or opened (the current will spike when it reaches either end position)... and the motor is relatively powerful, powerful enough in fact to shred the plastic gears. It's laughable - this thing consists of a few pieces of plastic, an RFID antenna loop, a motor and a tiny PCB, but costs 160€.
Re: Fixing a broken smart cat feeder with ESP32
#8I 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?
You could get a dev board and a breakout board on aliexpress for less than $6 - this way you can get away without any soldering for most use cases. And if you use esphome and homeassistant, pretty much all code is just configuration and setup in homeassistant.
Re: Fixing a broken smart cat feeder with ESP32
#9> 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.
How could you tell? Don't they usually act as if they're starving?
Re: Fixing a broken smart cat feeder with ESP32
#10> 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.
How could you tell? Don't they usually act as if they're starving?
It'd be much skinnier and/or dead.